In today’s digital marketing world, it’s hard to imagine what life would be like without social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Well, there was a time when traditional print ads, billboards, and TV commercials ruled advertising. In order to fully understand the ever changing digital realm, it’s important to understand where it all came from and how it has evolved. Here are the biggest trend changes in the history of social media.

HubSpot is one of the most popular marketing automation software and services around. Being spammed is a nearly universal experience, and an annoying one to boot. HubSpot takes pride in supplying alternative methods to attract visitors to clients’ websites. But it’s not for every business. Below are a few of HubSpot’s pros and cons to ensure that you’re choosing the right marketing automation software.

It’s 9 a.m. Sunday morning. In tradition, you and your family hop in the van and drive seven minutes to Joe’s Family Diner for breakfast. All the wait staff knows you by name and wants updates on your children’s soccer games. Joe, the owner, comes out from the kitchen to give a wise life lesson. The food is pretty cheap and tastes great, but the real reason you drive up to Joe’s Family Diner every Sunday—rather than Big Boy or IHOP—is because of the relationships you’ve made there.

Marketing can be a tough task, not to mention the amount of time it takes to get a plan off the ground. We’re here to tell it to you straight: professional marketing is done best by those who practice it. An in-house department with few employees may put crucial aspects of the job on the backburner, leading to sub-par marketing.

Facebook Insights, Facebook’s social media monitoring tool, has made Facebook a top contender for digital marketing. With all kinds of data on likes, reach, and blog post analytics, this tool is a marketing goldmine. Best of all? You get tons of information at absolutely no cost. Here’s an overview of the different marketing tools available on Facebook Insights.

Thanks to its social media monitoring tool, Twitter has become one the most useful services for marketers. Not only is it free, it has 305 million monthly active users. What’s more, by tracking impressions, engagement, clicks, and all kinds of information on your viewers, Twitter Analytics can help show you how best to cater to your audience. Here’s an overview of the most important information Twitters social media monitoring tool gathers.

Networking for B2B businesses relies on industry events and meetups, but these don’t happen every day, making them somewhat unreliable. Similarly, the potential leads for a B2B business aren’t exactly the general public. When attempting to reach such a small, segmented list of buyer personas, the best place to turn includes virtually everyone you want to reach: social media platforms.

Corporations aren’t the only ones developing a marketing automation strategy these days. Businesses of every size take advantage of marketing automation techniques, allowing certain marketing messages to be sent automatically. This frees up more time to work on other aspects of your business, such as marketing work that requires more of a hands-on approach. However, one wrong move and your correspondence will become just another spam email sent to the junk folder.