Using social media has multiple benefits. It ends up not only promoting your blog posts and offers, but also helps you in building relationships with your existing and target customers, industry influencers, and so on. Monitoring and engaging with the conversations surrounding your brand, product, and service are two of the most important social media activities that a brand should perform. Let's explore how the social media prospects tool provided by HubSpot helps us achieve this.
The objective is not just to engage with positive conversations around your brand but also around the negative conversations which will have a deep impact on your business. One can also use this option to discover influencers talking about their brand/industry, to monitor the competition, to spot the crisis or to manage a crisis. The following steps will guide you to use the HubSpot's social media prospects tool:
In the Content tab, select Social Media from the drop-down list as shown in the following screenshot:
Click on the Monitoring option, which is located to the right-hand side of your browser, as shown in the following screenshot:
Now, with the Social Inbox screen in front of you, click on the Get started with Social Inbox button as shown in the following screenshot:
You will have to connect your Twitter account (personal/business) depending on your requirement for monitoring. You can also connect a different Twitter account by selecting the Connect another Twitter account option. Once you are done selecting your account for monitoring, click on the Enable monitoring for these accounts option as shown in the following screenshot:
You will see a screen with the message All done, which means your account is successfully connected to monitor the tweets and mentions, as shown in the following screenshot:
It's time to monitor for your business-relevant keywords and start engaging with them. You have the options for monitoring all of Twitter, a Twitter list, or a contact list. In the following example, we've selected the All of Twitter option and specified a few business-relevant keywords under the column Find ANY of these words to look out for relevant conversations. You can also specify an e-mail ID under the Notify these recipients column to get real-time alerts straight to your inbox. Based on the keywords you track, assign a name for the stream to avoid confusion. Once you are done with the basic settings, click on the Create button to ensure the completion of the process of creating a stream to monitor, as shown in the following screenshot:
Now you will be able to see the relevant Twitter conversations surrounding your business right on your screen, similar to the following screenshot. Pick up the most relevant tweets and start engaging with them. If it's an industry influencer mentioning your name, you could retweet them or reply, thanking them. If it's a business opportunity, try to give appropriate information or guide the user to your landing page where they can find relevant information. Make sure that you don't retweet or reply to any of your competitors' tweets.
