The question many marketing leads ask is whether to run social media in each platform, use a dedicated tool (Hootsuite, AgoraPulse, Sprout Social) or manage it inside HubSpot. The answer comes down to one thing: whether you want to manage posts, or tie social to revenue.
Dedicated tools are good at scheduling and monitoring. What none of them does is connect each social interaction to the full sales cycle. That is where HubSpot is different, and that is where the decision is made.
A unified view of the customer
In HubSpot, social is not an island. Each interaction (a like, a comment, a click) is tied to the contact's history in the CRM, from first touch to conversion. An isolated tool shows engagement; HubSpot shows which campaign generated pipeline and which did not. With a single source of truth, you optimise on revenue, not vanity.
Personalisation from history
Reaching the right person means knowing what they have already done. Because everything sits on the same platform, you segment audiences by the full interaction history. If a contact engaged with content but did not convert, you build a remarketing audience directly in HubSpot and send something relevant. Pure social tools do not connect to that history, which limits remarketing and relevance.
Automation that follows up
B2B decisions are rarely immediate. HubSpot automation keeps the contact engaged over time: a social interaction can enrol someone in an email or ad flow that nurtures them until they are ready. With isolated tools, many of those interactions are lost, because there is no link between social, email and automation.
Reporting tied to revenue
The biggest advantage is not stitching data together from several tools by hand. In HubSpot you see, in one place, how many clicks a campaign generated, how many opportunities came from them and what revenue they produced. When ROI per campaign is what matters, knowing exactly which post or ad generated the deal lets you optimise what counts.
Support integrated in the CRM
Social is also a support channel. HubSpot's social inbox centralises messages and treats them as part of the CRM: when you reply to a comment, you have the contact's history in front of you. That link between support and marketing gives more aligned replies and, often, it is what closes the deal.
Where the sector fits (without being the focus)
None of this is specific to one industry. In a long, emotional cycle such as tourism, for example, tying each social interaction to the customer journey has a visible effect, because the decision matures over weeks and several channels. But the same principle applies to any B2B with a cycle that does not close on the first contact: the value is in tying social to the system, not in running it on the side.
How SmartLinks handles this
Running social in HubSpot only pays off if social is connected to the rest of the system: CRM, automation and reporting. Otherwise it is swapping one scheduling tool for another. As a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, within Content Engine and Demand Generation, we tie social to revenue, not to a vanity dashboard.
If you run social in a separate tool and cannot say what revenue it generates, you are optimising blind. The Diagnosis shows what you are missing.
References
- HubSpot Social Inbox
