Hey there, I thought I’d take some time today to show you the basics and benefits of using the HubSpot social media tools.
When you log into HubSpot you’ll land on your dashboard page. In the top navigation bar click on “Marketing,” then “Social” and you will be taken to the social publishing page.
In this case, we have a clean area because this is a new account and we haven’t posted anything. Click the big orange button in the top right corner that says “create social post.” You will get a slide-out window showing the social sites that you have configured. If you haven’t configured any social networks, you will need to do that before creating a post.
Creating your first HubSpot social media post
Click one of the social networks to begin creating your post. If you have more than one account for any of the social properties you can select one or more from the “Post From” drop-down menu at the top left corner of the post area.
Directly to the right of the “Post From” menu, you will see “When” with a date and time to the right. Clicking that reveals the scheduling dropdown, which gives you three options: manually schedule for any time in the future, schedule from two or three times the application suggests based on HubSpot’s data, or publish immediately.
Sometimes the next suggested time is a few hours out, but in this case, it’s only about 10 minutes, so let’s select that and try to get these done before then.
Next, copy the link to the content you want to share from the browser’s address bar and paste it into the social post content box. When you do that, a ‘card’ containing the image and summary text will be created automatically. Whether you can edit the card content in the publishing tool depends on the social network you’re posting to. LinkedIn has the most flexibility in that regard.
You also may have options to attach additional media such as images and video. Look for those options in the bottom left corner of the post window. In addition, some of the post types will retain the card if you delete the URL from the post window. I’ll often do that to keep that top “comment” area as clean as possible. But it’s not a big deal either way because HubSpot will automatically shorten it to a hubs.ly link.
On that note, always check your links, images, etc. on the social sites (or apps) after you’ve posted. You’re dealing with two completely independent companies talking to each other over the internet, so it’s not unheard of for things to break.
Hashtags and tagging are fully supported for Twitter, though HubSpot won’t verify/link your tag like native Twitter will.
Creating your second post
Once you’re finished with the first post, simply click another social network below the one you just completed, and repeat the process. The content from the last post will appear in the new one, but you will usually want to customize it for the site your posting to. For example, if your first post is to Twitter and your second one is Facebook, you’ll probably want to remove any hashtags.
Facebook is one you can safely remove the URL from without losing the card. For Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, you will already have the headline in the card, so it’s often a good idea to provide some commentary or note about the content you’re posting to up-top.
If you do remove the link from a post, be aware that the link will be missing from the next post. For example, if I remove the link from a Facebook post, then open the LinkedIn post windows, the content from the Facebook post will be copied into the LinkedIn post. If that happens, just re-paste the link into the new post and the card will pop back up.
One thing you don’t want to miss is the “campaign” dropdown in the bottom right corner of the post window. It allows you to associate the post(s) with a particular campaign. The same feature is available for most of the other HubSpot tools (email, landing pages, etc.), and if you make a habit of tagging everything, you will be able to segment your reporting by campaign at the click of a button.
After you have completed your last post, click the orange “Schedule Post” button at the bottom left corner of the publish window, and you will be taken to the scheduled posts page where you will see your posts in the queue. If you selected send immediately you can check the drafts and sent areas.
HubSpot Social Media Monitoring and Measurement
But perhaps the coolest thing about HubSpot’s social tools are the monitoring and analytics. You can view site traffic, leads and conversions attributable to social posts, and even changes in follower counts over time.
Another great feature is the ability to create tweet streams based on pretty much any keyword combination or attribute in the database. For example, you can create a stream of “current clients who tweet about software.” And you can even have the system send an email when a new item appears. You can even use boolean logic to get just the right stream results.
The browser plugin and beyond
There is also a Chrome plug-in that sits in your browser bar. If you’re on the internet and see something you’d like to share, just click the icon, and the social media composer will slide out with the URL and card already populated. It’s a great tool if you post a lot of third-party content.
Finally, there’s one more way to post, and that’s directly from a blog post page in HubSpot. Just click the “Share” button at the top right side of the page and you’re good-to-go.
All-in-all the HubSpot social tool is worth getting to know well. Once you do, you’ll wonder how you lived without.