Social media management platform Hootsuite announced today that it was acquiring Brightkit, an engagement platform for creating customized social marketing campaigns.
Through its acquisition of Brightkit, Hootsuite will now offer “Hootsuite Campaigns” a new tool to help social media marketers build engagement among their audiences through targeted campaigns and promotions.
“Organizations are looking for new and exciting ways to engage their audience,” said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite in a press release.“Hootsuite Campaigns extends our social marketing capabilities, allowing businesses to reach new audiences through engaging contests, sweepstakes and galleries, all managed from their Hootsuite dashboard.”
The new product will give marketers the ability to:
- Create standalone galleries of user generated content based on responses to a specific hashtag or topic. This could include tweets, images, or videos submitted by the brand’s followers, all moderated in real-time before appearing on the company’s owned media.
- Run social media contests to increase audience engagement, which can be monitored through a customized stream.
- Manage and moderate social campaigns from the Hootsuite dashboard.
- Export social campaign data for real-time analysis and action
- Gain insights into customer feedback and create social impressions that generate leads
By launching “Campaigns,” Hootsuite is going head-to-head with several other platforms that specialize in aggregating user-generated content for social media marketing. This includes Offerpop, Rebelmouse, Postano and Mass Relevance (now part of Spredfast.) Out of these four, Hootsuite’s product sounds most similiar to what is already being provided by Offerpop, which, in addition to hashtag galleries and microsites, also helps brands run sweepstakes, contests and engagement campaigns on social media. That’s an interesting development, especially given that Hootsuite recently announced an integration with Offerpop specifically so that it could offer social media campaigns to its customers. That could mean that Hootsuite is now competing with its own partner platforms.
UPDATED: Hootsuite responded to the question of whether it’ll compete with its partners with this statement:
Hootsuite’s ecosystem is designed to offer flexibility and choice for customers. We built Hootsuite to integrate with the complementary technologies our customers use. Similar to our array of analytics integrations, Hootsuite Campaigns is our owned solution for digital marketers, but we have strong partnerships with other campaigning platforms that we will continue to maintain and grow.
The one thing Hootsuite has going for it is that it offers an all-in-one solution to many social media marketers. It’s already one of the most widely adopted social media management tools, giving marketers the ability to listen, analyze and publish to almost all the major social media networks. Now, its enterprise users can take all that listening data and put it to actual use, all through a single, unified interface. With Hootsuite trying to rebrand itself as an enterprise-focused platform, it makes sense for it to offer a product that provides more tangible marketing returns in the form of brand awareness, engagement and even lead generation.
However, it remains to be seen whether its new tool can compete with the more established industry players, most of whom can integrate with other social media management platforms and already have a head start in developing more attractive features for enterprise marketers.
