I have been of course a fan of Hootsuite for many years, and they always continue to grow and evolve not only as a brand, but also as a product. They have gotten some great news earlier with their recent $35 million dollar investment, but what I am writing about is their new exciting feature they just announced. Today, Hootsuite made an announcement of acquiring Brightkit, which was a service that allowed users to create customized social media marketing campaigns for their clients.
Why is this an important development and trend we as professors and practitioners need to know about this move from Hootsuite? There are a few things. First, this shows the evolution of social media practice from exploring what the tools are to focusing more on the strategies for how to effective engage audiences, reach influencers, and demonstrate a full comprehensive sense of community. With their new designed enterprise product Hootsuite Campaigns, this allows users to integrate some of these key strategies into their campaigns like contests, sweepstakes, and many more options in a single dashboard. Here’s a short video to showcase their new enterprise product.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cxc73YWfSY[/youtube]
This is also bringing forth the new trend of pure strategic integration into a single platform interface. It appears Hootsuite Campaigns allows the user not only personal control of how their various campaign initiatives are going to look like, but also allows them to specifically target particular audiences, communities, and users online in a very effective manner across various social media platforms. I also liked the fact they have a good view of what the campaign analytics are going to be like – this will be interesting to see how this compares with other platforms and what is going to be different and similar compared to what they are currently offering right now.
What immediately popped into my head when I saw this was not only the huge potential this has for the classroom and for PR students, but also crisis communications. What if you were able to integrate this platform and campaign feature into your social media crisis strategy? If you had some of these same features embedded as part of your platform, you could integrate both listening and responding in a seamless and effective manner. Making sure your statements, updates, and messages are getting across with the official hashtags to the audiences that are impacted or want to know what is going on during the situation.
There are a lot of possibilities and exciting opportunities here with this new feature. It will be great to get an overview of what this platform and new product has to offer – Hootsuite is offering a free webinar to talk about the new product and you can register here. I am looking forward to hearing more about this new feature as well as how it could potentially be integrated as part of Hootsuite University, the advanced certification program offered by Hootsuite, and potentially how this could even be applied in their crisis communication simulation exercises.
Overall, this is not only a great product and tool for practitioners to be using, but students would hugely benefit from this experience and hands on training. These are the type of activities, skills, and duties most students are expected to know when they enter the workplace. It’s really great to see how a brand like Hootsuite is always thinking two steps ahead and adapting their products and services to accommodate for these evolving trends and expectations in the field. As a professor, this is great to see a brand taking a stand and lead on this to help better prepare our students for the workplace as well as provide these types of services to the social media community. Lots of great things happening – congrats again to the Hootsuite team on leading the way in this arena in social media strategy!
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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