Using the HubSpot Social Media Tools to Run Your Side Hustle

As an Academy professor teaching social media, it makes sense that I know how to use the HubSpot social media tools inside and out.

But I'm not just a teacher. I'm also a user myself, with my own website, crystalking.com, which is built on the HubSpot platform.

As an author, I need to be able to promote myself just like any other small business. To that end, I blog, I send my email newsletters through the platform, and I do all my social media within HubSpot. It's a true marketing hub for me. 

I'm going to share how I use HubSpot's social media tools and give you some tips — both in and out of the system — that work for me. Maybe they will help you, too. 

Speaking to Your Buyer Personas

One of the first places I began with HubSpot was my buyer personas.

These are particularly important when it comes to social media. I have specific personas that I want to target when it comes to my content. I have a novel set in ancient Rome about the man with his name on the oldest known cookbook. So for me, I want to find readers that love ancient Rome, cooking, and traveling, especially to Italy. I also want to reach social media marketers for the work I'm doing at HubSpot, and since I reside in Boston, I often share local information that might appeal to people in the area.

I try for a balance between all these personas, not sharing too much of one type of content, to make sure that I'm appealing to this broad (but yet still quite narrow) audience. 

Learn how to assign buyer personas to your contacts.

Creating Content

Content is at the heart of any great social media program. In this, I also break out the types of content into a specific mix of original content and curated content. 

For original content, I use two tools to help me develop images for social media but also for my blog and for my newsletter: Canva and BeFunky.

I love both of these digital services for different reasons. Both offer stellar image creation. I love how Canva will let me easily resize images for the various social media platforms. BeFunky has some fantastic photo filters, which really help make images stand out. 

For curated content, I rely on Feedly, a tool that I've used for the better part of the last decade. I follow hundreds of blogs and sites within Feedly, categorized to match my various personas. This lets me quickly and easily find content that my audience will respond to. 

I try for an 80/20 rule with content. 80 percent of the content is on topics tailored to my buyer personas — to position me as an expert or an influencer for those categories — and 20 percent is about me, my events, or my book. 

That leads me to the next step...

Publishing Social Media Content

I rely heavily on the HubSpot Chrome extension. After I find an article via Feedly and open it, I can click the HubSpot sprocket in my browser bar to easily schedule and share that article for my audience. 

I like to be as current as possible, so I only schedule 2-3 days ahead at most, but I know many people and businesses who use the HubSpot bulk upload tool to schedule Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook messages for weeks ahead.

When I'm running a social campaign, such as for a book giveaway that will last a couple of weeks, I schedule farther out. But, in general, I spend about ten minutes every morning, over my coffee, catching up on news that my audience will care about. 

I also like to check out the HubSpot calendar, when I do schedule ahead, to make sure I'm delivering content evenly across all the days of the week. 

Once or twice a week I'll develop new content. That ranges from sharing new blog posts or articles I've written for other sites or promotions for my book and events. 

Checking Social Media Reports

I check my social media reports fairly regularly. They help me see how my content is performing and where I should make improvements. My report for the last thirty days, for example, gives me some really interesting information:

My clicks are up, which means my content is working. Woohoo!

But, on the flip side, the interactions (likes, comments, retweets, +1s, reshares) are down. Way down, and it began in the middle of the month. While I've been able to keep up on content sharing, I've been less attentive in the last few weeks about:

Engaging With Your Audience

This is, hands down, the most important thing for me when it comes to the world of social media.  Word-of-mouth is the best marketing tool for any author. I want as many people as possible to be telling the world that they want to read my books or that they loved what they read.

Engaging with my readers builds loyalty and affinity. But it's also not just about readers. It's about reviewers. And press. 

To that end, I have specific Twitter streams in the social monitoring of HubSpot. I can respond to readers who like my books. I can monitor the #ancientrome hashtag and engage in conversation about the topics people are already tweeting about, with the hope they will continue the conversation or look to see who I am and subsequently purchase my books. I can also monitor book reviewers and press, engaging in casual conversation that ISN'T about my books (unless they ask), but instead is aimed at making my name familiar so when my next book comes out that my name is already in their minds. Building relationships in social media has helped me further my career and my reputation as an author more than any form of advertising ever has. 

With my most recent engagements down, I definitely want to make a goal to up my gain to have more conversations in the month of June, and not just push content out to people. 

Social Media and HubSpot Campaigns

This is where I am really starting to see the power of the combined HubSpot tools. When I share newsletters, specific blog posts, or landing pages, I can include them in campaigns.

You can also do so with social media posts. I just recently ran an Amazon giveaway, for example, and I created a campaign to tie together my blog post, several social media posts, and some paid advertising.

I plan on doing the same thing next month but will vary times and imagery to test effectiveness. It gives me a quick snapshot about my marketing efforts, enabling me to pivot and try a different tactic if I find that something isn't working. 

I hope that you found this helpful, and I'd love to hear from you on Twitter if you have a tip to share.