Our world’s use of social media is getting out of con—wait, Instagram alert… four new likes and a comment! Yaaas!—trol.

According to Pew Research from January 2018, at least one in every two and half people with the ability to engage with social media do, daily. In fact, as our two most populated age groups (18–29 years and 30–49 years) directly correlate with the two most active social media user groups (averaging 81 percent and 78 percent respectively on Facebook alone), you can safely assume that a reasonable portion of your listening demographic is actively on social media, for a large portion of all the time.

With all of this buzz about the world of opportunities around social media activity, it’s a good idea to take some time and think about the tools you’ll use to harness these platforms and maximize your access to such well segmented, organically engaging captive audiences. I'm here to talk about how HubSpot's social tools help you do exactly that.

If you are not careful, managing social media in the 21st century can start off feeling like a jolly joy ride down a grassy hill—until, with gravity’s help, you quickly pick up speed, imagine your name is Fred (last name Flintstone), and realize that neither your car, nor your feet were built to move at this increasingly fast pace. As you are now hurled down this horrible hill, you have three options:

1. Lose hope in your lost control and careen to a crash with your hands and feet in the air.
2. Try to figure out how to escape before your inevitable demise.
3. Cruise. After all, you'd never be in that situation because you’re not really Fred Flintstone, or in the Stone Age, and you can actually drive a car capable of cruising into control.

Just like cars today, social media marketing can have a mind of its own, with (according to Toyota) over 30,000 moving parts and one Fred Flintstone. It is very easy to get lost in the weeds of tweets, clicks, likes, posts, and shares... overwhelmed by the idea of tracking and making it all make sense. But, you don’t have to be. Your best option is to stay in the car as we cruise into control, and the way forward is to figure out how to control all these parts in as few moves as possible. HubSpot’s social tools takes care of that for your social media management and provides the data that allows you to focus on what matters most: your strategic plan for the beautiful road ahead.

Thanks to innovative technology, driving can be mastered by this boldly oversimplified cycle: Scan your surroundings. Plan your move. Pedal to the metal! How’s my driving? And thanks to HubSpot’s social tools, social media engagement can be easily optimized with the same sweet simplicity through monitoring, scheduling, publishing, and reporting. A good drive is proactive; that's Inbound.

On social media, the most effective Inbound strategy is to create content that generates interest, intrigue, affinity, and reciprocation as a result of an alleviated pain point, or an activated passion point. A systematically rhetorical flow of useful information that stimulates a want for more, or to “dig deeper.” This is complex, but check out how it can be accomplished in these simple steps:

Monitor – “Scan your surroundings.”
Monitoring helps you get to know your audience and learn their varying habits, identifying engagement trends and audience behaviors that correlate with your content elements.

With HubSpot’s inbox streams and twitter streams, you can achieve more effective engagement by monitoring what’s happening across clients and social channels to gain a better understanding of your unique social community. Streams are basically smart feeds that track engagement with social media content in real time.

With the inbox stream, you can collect and display all of your social media engagement in one place. With twitter streams, you can track specific twitter messages, follow contact lists or Twitter lists, and even respond to tweets!

Intel at your fingertips, kinda like…. a dashboard.

Schedule – “Plan your move.”
HubSpot's social scheduling tool helps you create deeper engagement with the ability to strategically plan how to do more of what works, and less off what doesn’t.

Beep. Bop. GPS locked and loaded, just like that.

Publish – “Pedal to the metal! Eyes on the prize.”
With the publishing tool, you can post to all of your social media accounts while generating and tracking inbound social traffic. You can even promote your relevant web content on social media, linking to blog posts, landing pages, images, and more.

Vroom vroom. Movement feels good, doesn’t it?

Report – “How’s my driving?”
After publishing, you can analyze the effectiveness of each post, assessing clicks and interactions in relation to publishing date and time.

With the social reports tool, you get a beautiful bird's-eye view of how all of your social media accounts are performing. From there, you can analyze your overall presence and engagement, comparing data from different time periods, and/or linked social channels.

You’ll need to manage all of these amazing tools, and you can do so in the social settings.

The key, is to cruise.
Things can easily get out of control, really fast. But, the beauty of HubSpot's social tools is that they help you get in control of your cross-channel social media engagement strategy, and more importantly, it helps you stay in control. Don’t lose control; instead, find tools like these, and be in control—cruise control.