Tips for How to Use Social Media with Hubspot- Promoting Blog Posts
Hubspot is the top educational leader and platform in inbound marketing and they do an amazing job.
Almost everyday you can find more information on how to improve use of blogging, SEO, social media, and email marketing.
But when small business owners are busy and trying to quickly get their blog posts out, they make a serious mistake with social media promotion, and thereby lose a lot of traction with their posts.
Eventually I hope that Hubspot can provide more in-platform tips and hints, but until then, small business owners will have to pay more attention and spend the necessary time to learn how to use all features of the Hubspot platform appropriately.
Turn off Auto Promotion of Your Blog Posts
I highly recommend not having any of your blog posts automatically promoted, and to turn this off in the social media accounts area. While it does simplify things to a point, it is not helping you promote your post. Here is what the automated post looks like:
And here is a more effective tweet that is clicked, visited, and even retweeted (meaning: people are clicking to visit, sharing the link, and reading your post)
Notice the hashtag #inboundmarketers, and the engaging question in the post? Wouldn’t you be more likely to click this than the previous tweet?
For example I would rewrite the first tweet as: Learn how to give your baby a gorgeous #vintage #nursery hub.am/ZMTCPj With pictures!
Here is a screenshot of the feature for Auto-publishing in Hubspot, please keep the Auto-Publish unchecked to follow this tutorial.
Promoting Your Post on Social Media with Hubspot
When you are done with your blog post you can go to the social media section of the site and compose a message. The tool allows you to choose a blog post to promote, and all of the platforms you want to send it to.
- To start with, choose the post you want to promote.
- Rewrite your post title, as if you were telling a friend about it. “Here’s my post on vintage nurseries for new moms, come check it out!”
- Now edit the message to include hashtags, generally you can use anything popular and that directly refers to your topic. For instance: #golf #travel #baby #marketing Ex: “Here’s my post on #vintage #nurseries for new moms, come check it out!”
- Consider mentioning anyone related to the post, for instance company names for brands you discuss, or other active Twitter users. In the future I hope that Hubspot makes using mentions easier, for now you will have to have a separate webpage open to Twitter to find people to mention.
- Now you can post to Twitter, as hashtags and mentions aren’t part of the Facebook platform.
- You can post the same update without hashtags and mentions to Facebook and Linkedin (if Linkedin applies).
- Depending on the best platforms for your business you should also visit Google Plus to promote your post.
Be Active on Social Media Outside of Hubspot
While there is a lot you can do within Hubspot, it is still lacking enough to allow you to only use their platform. At the very least you should also be using Facebook and Twitter.
- On Facebook- you should use your fanpage newsfeed and share popular items from your industry, as well as comment and be part of industry conversations.
- On Twitter- you should respond to tweets about your industry, from your followers, and visit often to discover new users to follow and to follow your new followers. When you are only tweeting links your account is flagged on some Twitter tools as spam and you lose followers.
- Google Plus is very active for several industries, at the very least visit, sign up and search for keywords that relate to your business, if there are a lot of responses, considering joining based on the time you have available to be active.
- Pinterest is a great place to market your post visually and unfortunately right now this is something that is not included in Hubspot features. I will be writing a post about being active on Pinterest and easily turning your posts into photos, for now check out Pinterest’s own video on using Pin it.
Make Time to Learn More
The secret to getting more out of using any kind of internet marketing is to continuously learn more about it. The Hubspot platform has many features that can be used to help your business achieve more success with inbound marketing. They have amazing guides to help you learn more, but service providers who focus on Hubspot can assist you even more, by helping you use the features you aren’t using.
The blogging aspect of Hubspot is great for SEO, but increasingly marketers are seeing that Social media is becoming a big part of being successful in SEO, take some time to learn more about how to effectively use Facebook and Twitter to get more leads, more traffic and conversions.
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