Redesigning a social media monitoring tool in a CRM platform

The Problem

Hubspot is a CRM platform designed to help small-to-medium sized businesses sell, market and provide service to new and existing customers. Their product offerings provide businesses an aggregated social media management tool to schedule and publish social posts, reply to social media interactions, build reporting and perform social listening tasks.

Since 2020, the organic social tool had been experiencing a steady decline in usage, even though it is considered a key marketing feature and it's adoptions increases usage throughout other areas of Hubspot

The Solution

An all-in-one social media inbox enabling users to efficiently manage and respond to messages and interactions across multiple networks and brands from a single location.

The Team

• 5 engineers
• 1 product manager
• 1 senior content designer
• 1 senior product designer 👋

Background

The value of Hubspot's social tool is the ability to streamline an omnichannel experience into one platform that manages the entirety of social media managers tasks including publishing content, building community and analyzing performance.

In September 2023, the community management stage which involved tasks related to monitoring and responding had significantly lower active monthly users than the creating and publishing phase of social media management. Compared to competitors in the industry there were gaps between data and features offerings.

Product audit & market research

Led research to evaluate our social monitoring tool against other industry products and identified key areas of concern, including missing core functionalities, performance issues, and friction points in the user experience that contributed to its lower adoption.

Target user

The primary user we chose to focus on was a social media manager generalist at a B2B company in the early stages of their social media strategy. These users make up over 80% of active users creating and publishing content on the social monitoring tool.

Often working in small marketing teams of 1-3 individuals, their tasks include other marketing responsibilities outside of social media, making it difficult to prioritize and respond timely to messages.

Given the customer pain-points, declining usage of the tool and opportunity to improve this stage of the user journey, we chose to focus on redesigning an approach that would simplify social communication into an easy to use task management tool.

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Learn more about this redesign process and hear some surprising takeaways from the user research—

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