4 New Features In The HubSpot Portal And What They Mean For You

It's tough to stay on top of all the new developments coming out for any platform. We keep you up to speed by sharing those items with you. Recently, HubSpot announced a few new changes that should be very useful, including advanced support for Twitter cards, calendar availability for messenger, & more.

HubSpot Posts and Twitter Large Card View

Twitter cards, if you are not familiar with them, are a great way to get additional media functionality to your embedded tweets. This increases the chances of engagement being a positive experience, no matter where your content lives. The different configurations of the cards appear differently both on Twitter and anywhere they are embedded.

The great news is that HubSpot now supports the larger card view for all posts created using a HubSpot blog and shared through the social tool. This means that when you share your blog post on Twitter, the tweet will use the larger card view by default. Your content will take up more space in a user's timeline and may increase the possibility of your content being noticed. 

Here's an example of a "player" card from Twitter as embedded with media content:

Connect & discover: The Twitter story in 1:40 http://t.co/TRRiDAbkUR

— Twitter Marketing (@TwitterMktg) November 8, 2013

There's also a great visual example of the difference of the large Twitter card view on HubSpot's blog post about this new feature, so go on over there and check it out, or you can simply tweet this post into your timeline and see how it looks! Let us know what you see over social media or in the comments below.

I've written a few other posts about Twitter that you may also be interested in too, like this one about Twitter Ads Event Targeting.

Calendar-Based Availability in Messages:

In late July, HubSpot announced that their messages feature, which allows users to interact with your staff around content in a window that is like a live chat, can now be set to function around a calendar. 

Initially, this interactive feature required your staff member to be logged into HubSpot and specifically the messages dashboard in order for users to see the welcoming functionality. Now, it is possible to attach that functionality to a calendar of availability, which should make it easier for any of your staff who are charged with using this new tool.

You can read more about this new feature and what calendar-based availability might add to your chat workflow on the HubSpot blog.

One caveat, however, is that this tool does not yet interact with Outlook or Google calendars, but I suspect there might be some additional functionality around this coming down the pike before long. I'll keep an eye out and be sure to let you know here when I see it come through.

Cleaner Contact Timeline:

One last thing I wanted to share with you that is new at HubSpot recently has to do with the CRM functionality of HubSpot. We like HubSpot because it is such a versatile tool, from blogging and inbound marketing, to social media, and dynamic landing pages. It also keeps track of who visits your website from your contact database. These touch points are located in a stream with each individual contact, and once your contacts spend any time at all interacting with your content, that stream can get a bit unwieldy.

As a result, HubSpot has recently taken some steps to streamline that view and to collapse a couple of events that used to be spread out. From HubSpot's blog post on this move:

"...your contacts’ sessions on your website are now rolled up into a single unified item on the timeline, rather than being separated into their individual page view components, and your upcoming engagements are bucketed under a single “upcoming” header rather than being spread across monthly sections."

You can get a more visual example of HubSpot's cleaner contact timeline on their blog.

TIMELINE API EXTENSIONS

Earlier this morning I got a notification that a new feature is now live in HubSpot. This one involves their APIs and will be of particular interest, both to HubSpot users and to developers or organizations who need to deal with HubSpot's interface and data. One of the things we love about HubSpot is that it has lots of potential for integration. As a result of those integrations, it can be challenging to know where to look for the most recent information, but HubSpot is making that even easier with this new feature. Moving forward, HubSpot is making it possible for certain integrations that pull their data into HubSpot to be able to have interactions with that data happen in iFrames inside the HubSpot interface. You can read more about integrations via the documentation here.

This could make for some better interactions when using the HubSpot platform and increase the adoption rates of those services that you attach to HubSpot that may be suffering from internal adoption. What do you make of the new possibilities for interactivity? You can see a more visual example of the new functionality in the image below that is an example of what Wistia data looks like when viewed from the HubSpot portal. 

As with most things in life, the changes keep coming, so make sure to subscribe to our email that will keep you in the loop on these changes as we see them coming.