How to Use HubSpot for Social Media

HubSpot is way more than a CRM for your sales team, it’s a powerhouse for your entire marketing ecosystem, and that absolutely includes social media. By bringing your social accounts inside HubSpot, you can move beyond simply posting and instead start connecting your social strategy directly to business growth. This guide will walk you through exactly how to schedule, monitor, and measure your social media performance using HubSpot’s tools.

Getting Started: Connecting Your Social Media Accounts

First things first, you need to link your accounts. You can’t manage channels from a tool they aren’t connected to. HubSpot integrates directly with all the major players: Facebook, Instagram (Business accounts), X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube. The process is straightforward and only takes a couple of minutes.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Navigate to Marketing >, Social in your HubSpot portal.
2. In the upper right corner, click the orange Connect account button.
3. A pop-up will appear, asking which platform you want to connect. Simply click on the one you want to start with (e.g., Facebook).
4. HubSpot will then redirect you to that platform to authorize the connection. You’ll need to be logged into the business account or have admin access. Follow the on-screen prompts.
5. Once authorized, you’ll be brought back to HubSpot, where you can configure a few settings, like choosing which Facebook Pages or LinkedIn Company Pages to connect.

Repeat this process for each of the social channels you want to manage within HubSpot. Once they’re connected, they will appear in your social settings, and you can start creating content.

Streamline Your Workflow: Composing and Scheduling Posts

This is where you’ll spend most of your time and where HubSpot really starts to streamline your process. The social composer lets you draft content for multiple platforms at once while still giving you the flexibility to customize it for each one. No more copying and pasting from one tab to another.

Crafting Your First Post in HubSpot

From the main social dashboard (Marketing >, Social), click the Create social post button in the top right. This opens the social composer, your central command for content creation.

Step 1: Select Your Networks
At the top of the composer, you’ll see icons for all the accounts you’ve connected. Click the ones where you want to publish this specific post. You can select one or multiple at the same time.

Step 2: Draft and Customize Your Content
This is where the magic happens. Type your core message into the main text box. You'll notice a central editor and tabs for each network you selected.

• For the general message: Write the main text of your post. Add your links, attach images or videos from your computer or the HubSpot File Manager, and tag other accounts using the "@" symbol.
• For platform-specific customization: Click into the tab for each network (e.g., the LinkedIn tab). Here, you can tweak the text to be more professional for LinkedIn, add a different set of hashtags for Instagram, or adjust the link preview for Facebook. This lets you maintain a core message while optimizing for how people actually use each platform. A shorter, punchier caption might work for X, while a longer, more detailed one could be perfect for LinkedIn.

Step 3: Schedule Your Post
At the bottom of the composer, you have a few options for publishing:

• Publish now: The post will go live immediately.
• Schedule for later: This is the most common option. Select a date and time in the future. HubSpot will even suggest optimal a.m. and p.m. times based on general engagement data, which is a great starting point if you're not sure when your audience is most active.
• Save as draft: If the post isn't ready, you can save it as a draft to come back to later. This is helpful for team collaboration or when you're waiting on final approval for an image or copy.

Using the Calendar for a Bird's-Eye View

Once you start scheduling posts, HubSpot's social calendar becomes your best friend. You can find it under the Manage tab in the Social tool. This calendar shows all your scheduled and published posts for the month, color-coded by platform. It’s perfect for spotting gaps in your content schedule, seeing how your campaign assets are spread out over time, and easily dragging and dropping posts to reschedule them without having to edit each one individually.

Listen and Engage: The Social Inbox

Social media isn't just a broadcast channel, it's a conversation. HubSpot’s monitoring tools help you listen to what people are saying, track keywords, and engage directly with your audience without leaving the platform.

Managing All Your Interactions in One Place

Under the Monitor tab, HubSpot brings comments, mentions, and messages from your connected accounts into a single stream. Think of it as a unified inbox for your social feeds.

• New Interactions: This stream shows you a real-time feed of comments and posts on your connected accounts. You can reply, like, or retweet directly from this stream.
• Conversations: For Facebook, this stream pulls in messages sent to your Page's inbox, allowing you and your team to reply to DMs inside HubSpot.

The biggest benefit here is efficiency. Instead of constantly checking five different apps on your phone or having a dozen browser tabs open, you can see and respond to everything from one organized dashboard.

Going Beyond Mentions with Keyword Monitoring

You can also create custom keyword monitoring streams. This is powerful for listening to conversations that are relevant to your brand but don't necessarily @-mention you directly. For example, a local coffee shop could create streams to monitor mentions of "best coffee in [city]" or the names of their competitors. This helps you find opportunities to jump into conversations, answer questions, and build your brand presence organically.

To set one up:

1. Go to the Monitor tab.
2. Click Create stream.
3. Choose X Post Mentions as the stream type.
4. Enter the keywords or phrases you want to track. You can get specific by telling HubSpot to monitor posts from certain users or that mention key accounts.

Use this to track an event hashtag, follow industry discussions, or just keep an eye on brand sentiment.

Measure Your Impact: Reporting and Analytics

Publishing content is only half the battle. You need to know what’s working, what isn't, and how your social efforts are contributing to your overall business goals. This is where HubSpot’s integration with its CRM truly shines.

Unifying Social Efforts with Marketing Campaigns

Before you even look at a report, get in the habit of associating every social post with a HubSpot Campaign. Campaigns are how you group related marketing assets (like blog posts, landing pages, emails, and social posts) together. When you create a post in the social composer, there’s a dropdown menu to select the campaign it belongs to.

Doing this allows HubSpot to attribute any new leads or customers generated from a link in that social post back to the campaign, giving you a clear picture of its contribution. Are your social posts for the "Summer Sale" campaign actually driving clicks to the sale page and generating contacts? Associating posts with campaigns is how you find out.

Analyzing Social Performance

Navigate to the Analyze tab in the Social tool to see your high-level performance. This dashboard shows you top-line metrics like:

• Audience: How your follower count is growing over time.
• Published Posts: A count of how often you're posting to each channel.
• Interactions: The total number of likes, comments, and shares across your accounts.
• Clicks: How many times people have clicked the links in your posts.
• Sessions & New Contacts: If your HubSpot tracking code is on your website, this shows how many website visits and new contacts were generated from your social posts. This is the golden ticket - it connects social activity to real business metrics.

You can filter this report by account, platform, or a specific date range to get granular. A key report to watch is Top Posts, which sorts your published content by clicks or interactions. This quickly tells you what type of content resonates most with your audience so you can create more of it.

For even deeper insights, you can build custom reports from the main Reporting tool. For example, you could create a report that shows which social platform delivered the most new customers in the last quarter. This level of analysis is only possible because HubSpot’s social tool is part of a fully integrated CRM and marketing platform.

Final Thoughts

Using HubSpot for social media is about more than just scheduling posts, it's about treating social as an essential, integrated piece of your marketing strategy. By connecting your accounts, planning content on the calendar, engaging with your audience, and, most importantly, measuring performance against real business goals, you transform social from a time-consuming task into a predictable engine for growth.

While HubSpot offers powerful integration for an all-in-one marketing approach, sometimes a dedicated social media tool built for the speed of today's content is exactly what a team needs. We built Postbase because the world of managing social media has changed. It's now centered around short-form video on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels - formats that older tools often struggle with. If you need a simple, reliable, and visually-driven platform designed specifically for an effective video-first strategy, you'll feel right at home with us.