Through user negative satisfaction feedback and customer support tickets being filed, in addition to a steady decline in usage of the HubSpot Social composer tools, it was clear there were many issues with the existing social feature at HubSpot. But what needed to be addressed, and how to do it?

After an extensive amount of user interviews we came out with two very clear users, and how they approach creating content across social: Content-first users, who create a single message, and cater it to each network, and Account-first users, who have an account, or set of accounts they want to post to, possibly varying in content (text, images, URLs, etc.).

These users, and getting a clear set of common problems across the board, gave us a clear set of ways we needed to improve, to better empower our users including: Better education within the social composer experience related to network limitations, better previews and ability to check work prior to publishing, access to the calendar feature to schedule from a high-level, and greater flexibility with sharing content like URLs, video, images and across other HubSpot features like blogs, emails, landing pages and even forms. A huge improvement included allowing users to create multiple versions of posts, across accounts, while still having access to a persistent preview, and making clear account-statuses, with the ability to fix things like expired tokens and reconnection issues, was key as well to ensure customer success.

By improving the overall workflow to match the rest of HubSpot's editing UI experiences, in addition to providing more accurate previews and flexibility with version-management across social networks (creating multiple versions of posts, across multiple accounts, at a single time), and flexibility with account statuses and management, we have already seen a dramatic uptick in usage, in addition to a reduction in negative customer feedback, and account connections has risen as well due to these improvements.