Connecting your social media accounts

Social media is a crucial channel for businesses to engage with potential and existing customers, but it can also be a time-consuming activity. With HubSpot, marketers now have a social media tool that can help them effectively manage their company's social accounts and give better insights into which contacts in their database prefer interacting on social media. Let's get you connected.

Follow these steps to connect your social media accounts to HubSpot:

1. Go to Settings | Tools | Marketing | Social | Accounts.
2. Click on Connect Accounts. The following screen will pop up, enabling you to choose which social media accounts you would like to connect. At the time of publishing, the social media accounts illustrated here are what HubSpot currently supports:

Figure 1.22 – Choosing which social media accounts to connect to HubSpot

3. You must have Admin access to accounts you wish to connect to HubSpot. Then, follow each step that will appear on subsequent screens to connect the accounts.
4. Once your social media accounts are connected, you can choose the scheduling format you'd like by clicking on the Publishing tab, as shown next. Here, you can choose the times you wish to publish each day, as well as choose the intervals at which each post should be published:

Figure 1.23 – Publishing schedule

5. Next, you can set up how often you would like to receive notifications and updates about your social media activity by clicking on Email Notifications, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.24 – Email Notifications

HubSpot's social media tool is much more than a scheduling tool. It allows you to monitor conversations happening online about your brand and business, respond to those comments within the HubSpot platform instead of logging in to each social media channel, see exactly which contacts in your database are more interactive on social media than other channels, and measure the engagement you are achieving on each platform. In later chapters, we will show how you can successfully integrate your social media strategy into an existing campaign using HubSpot's social media tools.

Managing contacts and creating lists

The power of HubSpot lies within its CRM. It is your single source of truth (SSOT). The CRM collects all information about the contacts in your database as the properties are used to gather and store this intelligence. With a very robust CRM in place, you can fuel all other activities that take place in HubSpot—marketing, sales, and service. This section is dedicated to helping you manage the CRM efficiently and correctly.

Understanding properties

Properties are used to store data on certain objects within HubSpot—for example, contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. There are default properties that are built into the HubSpot platform and cannot be edited. A few examples of such properties are First Name, Last Name, Email, and so on, and there are custom properties that every user can decide to build.