HootSuite continues to build momentum as a platform for partners, developers, and users by extending functionality and integration opportunities with our Engagement API, another wave of apps to join the ever-expanding HootSuite App Directory and the external integration of the dashboard with click.to, an application designed to streamline social sharing and workflow.
Starting today, users can gain access to another wave of new apps that join the App Directory including Digg, TrendSpottr, and InboxQ. These apps are available immediately to HootSuite Basic, Pro, and Enterprise account holders worldwide.
The HootSuite Dashboard is ever-expanding, and with our App Directory we’ve taken new tools and networks under our wings, incorporating them into the dashboard alongside the top social network integrations you already enjoy. To help get you acquainted with the App Directory’s functionality, we have a new #HootTip all about this handy HootSuite feature.
Adding an App
The HootSuite Dashboard is the ultimate tool for managing multiple social accounts across numerous social networks. Now, thanks to the HootSuite App Directory, even more of your favorite social networks and content management tools have joined the nest. Interested in adding YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more right alongside your streams for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Read on feathered friends to find out how. Read more…
Constant Contact, Summify and Formulists Streams in HootSuite
The recently released App Directory already includes YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and Get Satisfaction apps from third party developers. These new tools are available immediately to over 2.7+ million HootSuite users worldwide, and will allow teams managing social campaigns to collaborate across a greater number of social networks.
Audience Building Apps
Basic, Pro and Enterprise users can apply advanced HootSuite functionality to the management of these additional social content tools:
Constant Contact - The Constant Contact app allows HootSuite users to view results of recent email campaigns, and share these campaigns across social networks, extending the reach of their online marketing initiatives.
Summify - Summify users can take control of the large amount of news on social networks and filter important updates into personalized digest summaries within HootSuite’s user-created streams.
Formulists – Managing Twitter lists is now easier for Formulists users to view dynamic, personalized list streams within the HootSuite dashboard.
Have an idea for an App? We invite interested developers to apply for access to build out useful integrations for over 2.7 million+ HootSuite users. By working with external developers, HootSuite is rapidly launching purpose-specific tools into the platform which allow users to take advantage of the engagement, collaboration, security and metric reporting tools available in the dashboard.
And be sure to follow us @HootSuite_Apps for all the latest and greatest updates and integrations.
In this news round-up, we’re following the buzz of the many taste-makers and influencers from around the world who have found different uses for the tools in the HootSuite dashboard.
We’ll start in the Oval Office with US President Obama who Tweeted via HootSuite‘s scheduling function during his State of the Union Address. Plus, we’ll recap some of the other curious Owls who wrote about the dashboard this week, including articles from Social Media Examiner and Experience Farm.
Hoots from the ‘House
Last week the USA – and anyone watching *elsewhere* – got a double-dose of Obama. While he gave his State of the Union address, he also posted updates on Twitter using HootSuite and the hashtag #sotu for easy searching.
Were you wondering how he could Tweet and speak at the same time? You’re not the only one.
The scheduling and team assignment tools in the HootSuite dashboard are ideal for time-sensitive – and event-specific conversations – on the social web. The LA Times noticed too, have a look:
HootSuite and Constant Contact have a cool collaboration going with the Social Share tool which helps broadcast to even wider audiences – and we’re working together to find even more ways to combine social media into your email campaigns. In this post Jason Meserve shares some scheduling tipsfor their audience of savvy marketers:
It’s 11 p.m. and you just thought of a great tweet or Facebook post. But if you post it now, your customers or members who are about to head to bed may miss it. With HootSuite, a Constant Contact partner and one of my favorite real-time social media tools, you can create a post when the creativity strikes and schedule it to go out at a time when your fans andfollowers are most likely to see it.
The ability to schedule my social media updates is just one of many reasons I love HootSuite and use it every day. Here are some others:
It’s web-based, so you can access your account from any Internet-connected computer and all your social media information will be there.
It supports multiple social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, and Foursquare. No wonder HootSuite calls itself the Social Media Dashboard!
You can manage multiple social network accounts via a single HootSuite login, meaning no longer having to login to one Twitter account at a time or have separate browser windows or tabs open.
The tabbed interface makes it easy to move between social network accounts and quickly schedule updates for all the accounts you oversee in a matter of minutes.
You can post the same update to multiple networks all at the same time.
You can get great reporting data about how many people clicked on your Twitter links, which will show you how compelling your content is and what your followers find most interesting.
Talking Freemium
HootSuite is available as both a Basic (free) or a premium (Pro) plan giving users a choice the best tool-set to suit their needs. This hybrid is called Freemium, and here are some posts all about how our business works:
HootSuite CEO, Ryan Holmes weighs in on the development of HootSuite in this handy and informative podcast. Take some time over your next lunch break to learn more about the the story behind HootSuite with this in-depth interview with this wise Owl.
The article really got people talking. Be sure to check out all the comments from the folks that offered up their thoughts, and the responses from the friendly owls at HootSuite HQ — we always enjoy talking with others about the dashboard, so post your comment too!
Writer Nichole Kelly caught the power of the Custom URL Parameters and explained how this data can “close the loop” by showing the payoff from a company’s social efforts:
This is a game-changer for tracking return on investment (ROI). It certainly has its limitations in that you must have some mechanism for conversion on your site that you can use to evaluate sales, whether it’s lead forms or actual online orders.
For service businesses, lead forms will likely be the only way you can measure sales interest using the campaign integration feature, but that’s far better than what we’ve had access to in the past.
From a cost standpoint, I think HootSuite Pro is reasonable with their $5.99 per month charge, and while I would prefer to have two levels of users to avoid the $15 per month per user charge for all of our users, with a corporate budget it isn’t unreasonable. This is certainly a nice entry point for businesses that are looking to have ROI-level measurement capability without dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars for costly systems integrations and custom developmen
They included a quote from Ryan summing up the tool:
Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said, “We designed HootSuite to be a comprehensive dashboard for agencies, enterprises and consultants using social media to monitor brands, manage campaigns and analyze results. We’ve integrated with the leading social networks – including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn– and now look forward to adding mash-ups through our API as well as adding more reports which business users seek.”
HootSkillz
Seeking to dig deeper into the HootSuite dashboard? Here are a few sources of handy advice and how-to’s:
The friendly farmers at Experience Farm recently cultivated an incredible crop of HootSuite how-to articles — like How to Batch Upload — and next shared a round-up for more how-tos for using the dashboard in this Top 10 list:
NOTE: We (try to) include the best user-generated content in the User Created Tutorials section of the Help Desk. If you’ve written something, or found a great article that should make our list, leave us a comment about it below.
HootSuite Community Director Dave Olson recently conducted a mentoring session with emerging entrepreneurs at Bootup Garage to provide some intro tips and quick-start techniques for social marketing. Maura and Sonya put it all in a helpful post summarizing Dave’s tips:
Create Lists. Start following the people who care about your product as well as watching your competitors.
By listening and asking specific questions, you will start to build relationships with your customers.
Respond and participate in the conversation.
Each community is different. For example, your customers may act differently on Facebook vs. Linked In. Watch this and communicate accordingly.
When someone writes an article or post mentioning you or your area of expertise, COMMENT. It shows you are paying attention and care about your community and the people, who are taking the time to write about you and use your product.
Create 3-4 touchpoints to an article. For example, Dave will comment on an article, social bookmark it and add it to an RSS Feed = juicy, indexable goodness.
Hashtag everything. Topics, brands, acronyms – be creative and always remember to listen to your audience and be consistent with your message.
Los búhos de HootSuite también ululan en español
The Spanish speaking Hoot-fans of the world make up a huge portion of our user base. In fact, Spanish is in the running to be the next language completed in our translation project. With the diligent work of our Spanish HootSuite community, we’re seeing lots of great posts in Spanish. Below are a few articles for your enjoyment.
The year has flown by and looking back, it makes us smile to see how far HootSuite has come – indeed we are happy to see all the amazing new developments and integrations we’ve hatched to our growing, global audience of Hoot-fans.
To ensure you haven’t missed out on any of the fun we’ve had, and reflect on the progress, we assembled the most notable HootSuite achievements this year. We hope you enjoy reliving some of the great HootSuite memories from the past 12 months, because you were part of the story.
January 2010 – New Beginnings
New year, new launch, new focus on community development and relationships: In January of 2010 HootSuite officially spins out on its own with about as many people as you can count on one hand. Thanks to the injection of some funds raised to jumpstart the dashboard, HootSuite launches WordPress, trend explanations and URL previews. And a new Owl joins the nest — Dave Olson joins HootSuite to develop the HootSuite community and starts off strong by introducing News Round-ups to help spread the word.
February 2010 – Aquarius Barn Owl
Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Games and HootSuite has some growth of Olympic proportions down at HQ. HootSuite releases a second iteration (code-named Barn Owl) which integrates Social CRM, campaign measuring and influence tools, and launches a new help desk for top-shelf support and a feature suggestion channel to gather ideas.
Plus, HootSuite hits the road to attend Seattle 140tc, Toronto’s Sprout Up, and Austin for SXSWi where the interviews, networking and socializing were non-stop with conversations about Foursquare/Myspace added to the dash. To top it all off, we managed to get some time in SF to build fortuitous relationships.
April 2010 – New Advancements
April brings ow.ly and ht.ly — two flavors of social bars for link-sharing/shortening needs. iPhone gets an update with translation, Facebook and geo-location tools, and school is in for spring with the introduction of HootSuite University — a subscription-based learning program with a social media certification for graduates.
If that’s not enough, the hugely-awaited and artfully-created team assignment tools are released to help delegaters the whole world over draft, schedule, and assign tasks to team members for efficiently managing social mentions and interactions.
June 2010 – Updates and upgrades
Half way through the year and there’s no sign of slowing down — in fact the pace increases. To pay homage the online world we live in, we celebrate Social Media Day with some treats for geeks, then release the HTML5 version of HootSuite to help users utilize the capabilities of the latest browser with geo-search, themes, Google Analytics, native/old-school Retweets and more.
Plus – June brings a Japanese version of the web app and an update to iPhone with Korean and Arabic localizations baked right in.
And who didn’t learn to love vuvuzelas just a little bit during World Cup? We use July’s football-phenomenon to interact with a whole new flock of our international users (and have a lot of fun doing it) and added some weight to the masses of Tweets as soccer fans the whole world over tested the limits of Twitter’s capacity.
August 2010 – Up-ing the Velocity
Ready? If you blink you’ll miss all of the August action. We’ve cranked up the heat with a bevy of new additions. First off, we announce a relationship with Constant Contact, announce the new freemium plans, get USA Federal-friendly with an updated terms of service which gets us listed in the apps.gov site (much to the joy of many key agencies).
We give you a sneak peek of the highly anticipated BlackBerry.
And we release ow.ly pro custom URL shortening services
Not enough? No problem, we’ll also throw in a live Twittering case study of an operating room using HootSuite to live-Tweet a surgery in progress. Enjoy!
HootSuite Free Mobile Apps - BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Android
Summer is long gone, the leaves have turned, and October has a bountiful harvest for HootSuite this year with Open ID and Mobile fest. Now HootSuite users have the option to login to their account or create new ones using any OpenID account. Plus there are mobile delights for just about every owl – BlackBerry is released, iPhone and Android are updated, there’s a preview of keitai, and iPad – and all mobile apps become free during Mobile Fest.
November 2010 – A Million Reasons to Hoot
It’s migration season, and the great migration to our freemium model is conducted, along with resources for team building, HootSuite style. Constant Contact is back in November and this time they announce that they’ve got HootSuite’s Social Share baked right in to their interface. If that’s not enough, we officially pass over 1 million HootSuite users, so we release a killer info-graphic and contest to guess when we crossed the threshold (congrats again @kelkel926!)
It’s been quite a year, and HootSuite is just getting started. To wrap up 2010 and create some momentum for the new year, we’ve got a whole list of goodies to announce:
Looking ahead to next year Hoot-fans can expect to see a load of new integrations in our App Directory to help make your social media management even better with some highly-requested networks coming rapidly.
Thanks to all of you for making this year amazing. We have some fun stories, news round-ups and Owly pictures to post over the holidays. Plus, we’ll see you back in January with events from New York and Mumbai plus an upcoming panel at SXSW called Big in Japan.
HootSuite HQ is buzzing with the development of a number of new tools and applications to help HootSuite enthusiasts enhance their experience on the dashboard.
Next up is the HootSuite Social Share tool which allows partners and their followers to spread messages to even greater audiences across multiple networks.
Today we’re pleased to announce the venerable email marketing company, Constant Contact, as a launch partner with HootSuite. They’ve built the Social Share tool right in to their latest release for the convenience of their customers.
And, whether you are a big company or an emerging blogger, HootSuite’s Social Share is ready to go for you today.
Easy Sharing
HootSuite Social Share Example
The social share tool acts much like the beloved Hootlet. A simple click pops open a window pre-populated with your custom messaging that your fans can add their thoughts to and share on whichever networks they choose. Plus your audience can use all the usual HootSuite tools like scheduling, adding images and more.
Implementing this tool couldn’t be easier — simply add the code snippet to a blog, newsletter, or website and your readers can quickly amplify across their social graph.
Social Email
Constant Contact has baked the Social Share button right into their web dashboard. Customers can share across all social networks with a tool that’s fully integrated into their familiar interface.
What’s more, we’ve streamlined the account provisioning process, meaning that Constant Contact customers can create a HootSuite account in just a few steps — no forms, no applications, just a click and you’re good to go.
HootSuite Social Share for Constant Contact
This integration builds upon our co-marketing agreement with Constant Contact, and will allow Constant Contact customers to easily pass along their email marketing messages to any HootSuite-ready social network.
That’s right, Constant Contact has partnered with HootSuite as part of HootSuite’s new Social Share feature, and it has multiple benefits for our users. With HootSuite, you can sit down for 30 minutes at the beginning of the week and create five, 10, or more posts — for Twitter, Facebook, or other sites — all at once. You can then schedule them to go live on different days and at different times throughout the week, and they’ll automatically be posted for you. If your posts contain a link — say to a coupon or event you created in Constant Contact — HootSuite will even track how many clicks you’ve received.”
Plans to Share
We’ve built two versions of this tool in order to reach the most number of users:
A Pro version for bloggers and independent site publishers.
An Enterprise version for large companies with vast audiences for more ways to share.
Here’s the basics of how Social Share can help spread your content:
Multiple Networks: Post messages simultaneously across channels
Schedule Messages: Send messages at optimal times
Image and File Sharing: Upload images, PDF files and other supported documents
Data Analysis: Users can examine their campaigns with click statistics
Rapid Integration: Should take under 10 minutes to enable
Enterprise plan holders can also utilize auto account provisioning, Ow.ly vanity URL integration and enhanced analytics and tracking.
But when you add in the nuanced iPhone update and more interest in the business world about efficiently using social media for listening, there is enough news to peruse for an afternoon.
Here are some recent stand-outs. Certainly, follow HootSuite’s social bookmarks for the full feed of HootSuite-related coverage and/or follow @hootwatch to be the early bird everyday.
TNW shares the news about some pro features in the HootSuite iPhone update:
Now on to the iPhone updates, which are quite impressive. … But the biggest new feature added to HootSuite’s iPhone app? Now users can utilize Bump to quickly add followers. A great new addition to an already fantastic iPhone app.
Jeff Cormier also mentions the addition of HootSuite to the Apps.Gov catalog as the first social media dashboard:
This is great news for those government agencies that want to use a social media dashboard without jumping through too many extra hoops, approval queues, or application processes.
Amber Mac describes different ways to monitor your social media headlines and conversations that are coming at 100 miles a minute:
For the past couple of years, the popular micro-messaging site [Twitter] has increasingly become the go-to destination for headlines, keeping its users informed about what the world is talking about.
Aside from using a Twitter monitoring tool such as HootSuite, it can be cumbersome to go through pages of tweets to get the gist of what’s on the minds of the people you’re following (for example, I follow more than 3,000 people, which makes it nearly impossible to keep track of conversations).
Use tools to help — As the number of people you’re connected with on social media sites grows, trying to keep up with the constant flow of updates is like drinking from a proverbial fire hose. There are a number of free tools available that can help you keep up without drowning in information, including:
HootSuite is a service that lets you track all of your social media networks, schedule updates to go out automatically throughout the day, and set alerts if certain terms or phrases are mentioned.
Ben Parr offers results of a poll about ways to grow companies:
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen several web companies switch to freemium business models, offering free versions of their services but providing additional features and functionality at tiered prices. Hootsuite and Slideshare are just two companies that have recently switched, but there are many more turning to the freemium business model to generate revenue.
We were interested in the trend, so we made it the subject of this week’s Web Faceoff, our weekly series where we pit two opposing technology products or ideas against each other for your vote. We asked you on Monday which web business model you preferred.
Your winner: Freemium. With 36.88% of the vote (461 votes), Freemium was the preferred business model of Mashable readers. Ad-supported received a 24.4% share (305 votes), while 34.24% of you (428 votes) said it was a tie.
Minda Zetlin discusses reasons for scheduling Twitter updates for companies marketing around the world:
Most Twitter users don’t look at tweets that are more than a couple of hours old, so if you want people to actually read your posts, you should time them for when you have the largest live audience.
When is that? “If you have followers all over the world, Eastern Time during business hours is the best time to tweet,” Sansevieri says. “Generally, past noon Pacific Time is less useful. Retweeting starts to drop off toward the end of the day.” Although this is a good general rule, your customers’ habits may be different, so try experimenting, for instance by offering giveaways on different days and at different times to see which get the greatest response.
If the best tweet time for your market isn’t the most convenient for you, you can schedule tweets in advance using applications such as TweetDeck or HootSuite. Wolfer does this, for instance, to schedule some tweets in the middle of the night Eastern Time in order to reach her followers in Australia and Asia.
Nataly Kelly, an analyst at GLG, noticed the HootSuite Translation Project (Note to Nataly: we’d enjoy sharing more stories about this with you) and she totally gets the reason why to translate for the world:
We’ve written before about how businesses are embracing crowdsourced translation to enter new markets. Companies like Twitter, HootSuite, and others have recently embraced this practice too. However, some researchers even propose leveraging the power of online communities to quickly make information available in other languages for assisting with emergency response efforts in various parts of the world. Imagine if the victims of flood-hit Pakistan could quickly and easily receive cutting-edge, real-time information on relief and recovery efforts in each of the 73 languages spoken there.
Kristi Hines shares tips for tracking public information about your competitors and listening and learning:
Setting up a search for your competitor’s @username will give you a look into what people are saying to your competitor. This way, you can see what their fans (or enemies) like or dislike about them, as well as questions they have. You can create a search in Twitter by simply searching for the @username of your competitor and using the “Save this Search” option, or creating it as a new stream in HootSuite.
End of the Line
Next news round-up features plenty of Blackberry and a bit more translation news and miscellanous newsworthy treats. Remember, be the smartest Owl in your office by following HootSuite’s social bookmarks and/or follow @hootwatch for more mentions from all corners.
Email and social media are both powerful marketing channels on their own but, when by using the best attributes of each medium, you can enjoy even more successful campaign results.
With this in mind, HootSuite and email marketing company Constant Contact have announced a co-marketing partnership which will inject a bit of social-bility into your email blasts — plus provide ways to augment your social media outreach tactics with targeted email messaging.
Certainly, marketers want access to as many tools as possible so we’re excited to announce this new relationship which will add a few more implements to your mighty tool kit.
The gist of the partnership is summed up in the press release‘s tag line “Partnership Increases Reach of Two Industry Leaders; Extends Marketing and Social Media Tools to Meet Broad Customer Needs.”
“We look forward to working with Constant Contact as a co-marketing partner to provide more methods for HootSuite customers to spread messages and grow audiences. With Constant Contact’s stellar reputation and vast experience, we’re very pleased to add this powerful partner to our team.”
You likely know about HootSuite so here’s a little about Constant Contact in case you haven’t tapped into their services yet:
Constant Contact’s email marketing, event marketing, social media marketing, and online survey tools help small organizations grow their businesses by building stronger customer relationships. More than 350,000 small businesses, nonprofits, and member associations worldwide rely on Constant Contact’s easy-to use, affordable online tools to create and deliver personalized, professional communications that engage casual customers, members, prospects, and passionate customers wherever they congregate online — from their email inboxes to their social networks. All Constant Contact products come with unmatched education, training and personal coaching services, and award-winning technical support. Founded in 1995, Constant Contact is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: CTCT) with offices in Waltham, Mass.; Loveland, Colo.; and Delray, Fla.; and a Silicon Valley office scheduled to open in 2010.
Winter is here and while it’s a welcome for the many snowy owls hitting the slopes this December, the owls at HootSuite are already speeding away – releasing a 
In this news round-up, we’re following the buzz of the many taste-makers and influencers from around the world who have found different uses for the tools in the HootSuite dashboard.
HootSuite and Constant Contact have a cool collaboration going with the 
For service businesses, lead forms will likely be the only way you can measure sales interest using the campaign integration feature, but that’s far better than what we’ve had access to in the past.
watching your competitors.
Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Games and HootSuite has some growth of Olympic proportions down at HQ. HootSuite releases a second iteration (
HootSuite CEO 
Half way through the year and there’s no sign of slowing down — in fact the pace increases. To pay homage the online world we live in, we celebrate 
We bring on 
Ready? If you blink you’ll miss all of the August action. We’ve cranked up the heat with a bevy of new additions. First off, we announce a relationship with 
And while we’re at it we’ll add 
Schedule Messages: Send messages at optimal times
Image and File Sharing: Upload images, PDF files and other supported documents
Data Analysis: Users can examine their campaigns with click statistics
Rapid Integration: Should take under 10 minutes to enable
Use tools to help — As the number of people you’re connected with on social media sites grows, trying to keep up with the constant flow of updates is like drinking from a proverbial fire hose. There are a number of free tools available that can help you keep up without drowning in information, including:
Most Twitter users don’t look at tweets that are more than a couple of hours old, so if you want people to actually read your posts, you should time them for when you have the largest live audience.
We’ve written before about how businesses are embracing crowdsourced translation to enter new markets. Companies like 
