Any good inbound marketing strategy will always include some level of social media integration. Whether at the basic level of distributing your content out onto different social networks, or at the more advanced level looking for sales prospects amid tweets and LinkedIn groups, there's lot that you can do with social media to bolster your lead generation efforts.

Social Media Publishing

There’s been plenty of social media apps that seek to make the whole process easier. Whether it’s the HubSpot social media publishing tool that lets you post across your LinkedIn groups, or free alternatives like Buffer that will space your tweets out during the day, social media publishing has been greatly improved over the past few years.

What about everyone else that’s publishing though? How do you make sure that social media doesn’t just become everyone shouting into a void, with nobody actually paying attention? How do you meaningfully connect with all of those Twitter followers?

Social Listening

“What people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies.” 

- Seth Godin (a featured speaker at Inbound this year)

Most marketers know that there's a lot of value in listening on social media channels. Just like we all know we're supposed to eat 5-9 fruits and vegetables a day. We hear our inner Gary V's shouting "CARE!" and then we shrug and say "I would, but with what time?" and then we get back to work. The good news is that you aren't alone. 

The inability for most companies to effectively leverage social listening makes it MORE important, not less. It represents a huge competitive advantage. 

The tools that enable you to be more efficient at getting a message out haven't really caught up to help you get more messages in. 

Until now...

Welcome to the Social Inbox

This problem is getting solved today. HubSpot is introducing a new Social Inbox feature that allows you to get meaningful interactions out of Twitter and helps your sales force keep track of prospects on social media. 

With it, you can create dedicated search streams that allow for specific searches by terms, locations, twitter lists, and more. Furthermore, you can set up alerts to get notified when certain search terms are met, or to get daily digests of who’s mentioning certain items. 

This would be pretty cool just by itself, but since it’s HubSpot, you know there’s more to it. You can also leverage the twitter usernames of people in your contact database to see what those people are talking about. If one of your leads is talking about your product, maybe it’s time to reach out again. You can also track your customers to see what they’re talking about on Twitter. 

Social Sales

“Today's customers expect reps to do their homework and to reach out at the right time with the right message. Successful social salespeople don't annoy prospects before they are ready to hear from them. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to be high-touch with everyone all the time, so the smart salesperson strives to be low-touch until it's the right time to become high-touch.” --Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social

One of the real ways in which it shines is by setting up streams to search for prospects. You can find search terms that are things people are likely to tweet if they’re interested in your service. If you’re a photographer, you could look for people tweeting about engagements or events. If you’re a manufacturer, maybe look for people tweeting about industry terms or common problems. You can then set up alerts and reach out to these people.

This solves some of the common problems that we hear from clients all the time. They know social media is important. They know they could be using it better. But they don’t see how to get more out of it given the amount of time they have. Being able to set up custom searches right inside of hubspot and even tie them in with the contact database will help them see what’s really important without having to spend all day searching through Twitter.

So whether you’re a marketer trying to really target specific individuals on Twitter, a salesperson looking to find prospects, or a business owner trying to make the best use of their time on social media, you’ll definitely want to check out the new social inbox from HubSpot.