Social media is a pretty essential component of any marketing strategy. You can use it to engage with your customers in a friendly, approachable, and dynamic manner.
But posting for the sake of posting can actually be more harmful to your business than not using social media at all. Some brands have even taken the decision to step back from social entirely because it’s too difficult to control the conversation.
Many marketers find that creating social content but not knowing the results is another major issue. According to the Social Media Marketing Report for 2018, less than half of those surveyed agreed that they were able to measure their social media activity. To grow your brand and develop meaningful connections, you need to have a clear strategy in place with an understanding of who your target audience is, what they want, and what your goals are.
With that said, let’s walk through how HubSpot can help supercharge your social media strategy. You can use HubSpot to publish the right message to the right people at the right time.
Get certified in social media with HubSpot Academy—for free:
1. Find the Right Type of Social Content for Your Brand Using Buyer Personas
You can approach social media marketing from a variety of angles: to shape the conversation relevant to your offering, to build brand awareness and draw in new customers, or to reach out and connect to your current audience. For most brands, it’s used as an additional channel that runs alongside their main inbound marketing promotional activities like email, content, and PR.
When done right, social content doesn’t replace these methods—it supports them. Through in-depth analysis of your current campaigns and developing a sound understanding of your audience, you’ll be able to use your social channels to communicate with them in both a public and one-on-one medium. But before you start creating social content, you need to know who it is that you’re trying to reach.
While posting cat memes might work for some audiences, it may not be the best direction for your own brand. This is where the buyer persona comes in. Use buyer personas to identify exactly who your key demographic is. This way, you can hone in on the way they gather and consume information.
A buyer persona is your ideal customer in a nutshell. You can envision them as real people and understand their thought processes and needs. You may have already created a buyer persona as part of your wider marketing strategy. But now, it’s time to revisit them with social media in mind. Are they more likely to scroll Pinterest looking for ideas, or are they more likely to ask for advice on Facebook? Are they more active on social media in the morning or afternoon?
If you’re struggling to know where to start, the free HubSpot Make My Persona tool gives you a clear overview of the different kinds of information you need to consider.
2. Listen to Your Audience With Social Monitoring Streams
Nowadays, consumers want to find information on their own or through personal recommendations at a time and place that’s convenient to them. That’s why social media has become such an integral part of the buyer's journey. Rather than simply publishing and promoting your own content, it’s vital that you incorporate social listening and monitoring into your strategy.
In order for your brand to become a part of your consumer’s social conscience, you need to know what’s happening there already. What are they retweeting? Who are they following? Which of your competitors is getting the most engagement? Is there a particular platform they’re using most?
This is where you can use HubSpot to track and analyze your social audience. Create custom keyword monitoring streams to draw out relevant hashtags with automated email triggers so that if a prospect mentions something you’re tracking, you can take proactive steps.
You can also analyze your competitor’s social streams across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to learn what types of posts perform best in your industry and discover new ways to engage with your own audience.
3. Stick to a Social Calendar With Your Social Tools
So you feel like you know what kind of posts you want to be making and who you want to send them to – now you need to create a schedule to ensure there’s rhyme and reason to your content.
Rather than just posting when you get the chance, setting time aside to create a dedicated schedule will save resources and stress in the long run. It will make it easier to coordinate and monitor campaigns, in turn helping you grow your reach and scale your marketing activity based on clear results.
This is where HubSpot’s social tools come in.
In HubSpot, you can schedule all your outgoing social posts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn within one easy-to-use interface. It will even suggest optimum times to post so that you can ensure you’re reaching your audience at exactly the right moment.
Ready to get started with social media in your own HubSpot account?
4. Measure Your Success With Reports
Demonstrating a return on investment (ROI) from social media has long been one of the biggest challenges that social media marketers face. Especially when answering to those that don’t quite grasp its significance or intricacies. Though there are plenty of metrics across the board that can be measured, it’s difficult to pinpoint the ones that really make an impact on success, considering your social content can be targeting buyers at various points in their journey.
Which is why, when developing and fine-tuning your strategy, you need to set clear and defined KPIs across reach, engagement, ROI, and retention. It can be easy to fall into the trap of simply looking at likes and followers for a judge on success, when really, those numbers aren’t going to provide you with enough insight.
Arguably, one of the most significant factors of social marketing is its ability to convert leads. Therefore, success is often based upon social channels generating more leads at a lower cost, monitored through the four metrics mentioned above as well as a few others like response time and traffic to the website from social.
You can use out-of-the-box HubSpot social reports to hone in on social media performance across platforms, publishing times, campaigns, and more. This means that you can precisely measure and tactically adjust your strategy in line with physical results across key metrics.
To top it off, HubSpot integrates into your CRM. So you can use your social inbox and sources report in HubSpot to get a real understanding of the leads generated directly from social interactions—just like you would with emails or blogs. By understanding how many leads are created from social activity, you can then calculate an average cost per lead and start to build up an informed relationship with them through other channels.
5. Elevate Social Data Across Platforms With Integrations
Using other tools in addition to HubSpot? Great! You can maximize your productivity by integrating various other platforms with your HubSpot account.
HubSpot’s partner platform ecosystem has grown by 70% in 2018 alone. Alongside standard integrations across all the mainstream social media platforms, the list of integrations is always growing. Whether you use Sprout Social to manage customer service interactions or Oktopost to gauge social engagement, you can integrate with HubSpot to elevate the social data you collect across partner platforms.
Check out integrations in your own HubSpot account:
And there you have it! Those are some ideas you can use to get started with a top-notch social strategy in HubSpot.
Want to connect with others on HubSpot tips, tricks, and updates? Head over to the HubSpot Community to join a conversation or start one of your own.
