HubSpot Enables Social CRM With New Social Media Features

New social media features in HubSpot will help companies increase their reach and strengthen prospect relationships using social media.  HubSpot now features social media lead intelligence, automatically linking Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to a company's leads, so sales people can quickly learn about a potential customers' interests and challenges without additional research.  HubSpot's software also creates social media follow and sharing buttons on virtually all marketing content, helping marketers grow their audience, reach and leads. 

"Including unstructured social media data in useful and integrated ways within HubSpot will help businesses build more dynamic relationships with their prospects and unlock the value of social CRM," said Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials, a CRM consulting/advisory firm focused on small and mid-size enterprises.  "HubSpot's tools are making social an element of every sales and marketing activity." 

While marketers today seek to expand their reach of followers on Twitter and Facebook, manually adding follow buttons and profiles to websites can be cumbersome or nearly impossible without IT help. That is why HubSpot's automated "follow me" and blog sharing buttons, like Retweet (RT) and Share-on-LinkedIn buttons, facilitate a company's social media efforts.

HubSpot's social media features enable four of the key Social CRM (sCRM) use cases recently identified by the Altimeter Group's 18 use cases for Social CRM, namely Social Marketing Insights, Rapid Social Marketing Response, Social Campaign Monitoring, and Social Sales Insights. 

HubSpot believes that customers will use the software to execute these use cases in the following ways:

• Social Marketing Insights - HubSpot's social media monitoring captures brand and industry conversations so that marketers can track and respond to market needs and perceptions.
• Rapid Social Marketing Response - Interacting directly from HubSpot's social media monitoring tool, marketers can scan and quickly respond to positive or negative comments.
• Social Campaign Monitoring - HubSpot's marketing analytics track reach and campaign specific traffic, leads and sales for social media channels.
• Social Sales Insights - Sales people can quickly get a sense of an individual prospect's preferences and behaviors with HubSpot's one-click access to public social media profiles and activity streams.

These use cases will become ever more important as companies adapt to the new, socially driven business environment. 

"Social media is permeating all parts of business today," said Mike Volpe, VP Marketing at HubSpot.  "Small business owners and marketers are uniquely positioned to move quickly and leverage social media to build new and lasting relationships since they aren't encumbered with process and policy.  By giving small and medium sized businesses the tools and training to take advantage of these new sCRM use cases, HubSpot helps level the playing field to let entrepreneurs compete with larger, more established competitors."

To learn more about HubSpot's new features and future vision of social media as it relates to sales, marketing and sCRM, register for the HubSpot Summer 2010 Launch Webinar on June 8^th at 11AM ET.