Hootsuite to Allow Scheduling of Paid Ads

Lauren Peek | @_LaurenPeek The job of the social media coordinator would be much more difficult without the ability to schedule content ahead of time. Days don't need to be planned around sending out a tweet at exactly the right moment thanks to tools like Hootsuite. However, with recent API changes to Twitter, organic tweets often become buried in the mass of information and paid ads are becoming more necessary to get the word out.

Founded in 2008, Hootsuite offers scheduling for multiple social profiles and accounts, analytics reports, app integrations and RSS feeds among other things across LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare. Hootsuite has been regularly mentioned as a top social monitoring and listening tool but has lacked the scheduling and management of paid ads through their dashboard.

Thankfully, that is all about to change.

After a cash infusion of $60 million from U.S. investors, Hootsuite has invested in expanding the capabilities of their software. According to Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, the program will soon allow users to purchase social ads across all of their platforms via the Hootsuite dashboard. Hootsuite will be rolling out these features over the next 12 months.

“We’re looking at social advertising and how we can help our customers more with advertising and social. We’re able to tell people which messages at which time of day are the most successful for them, how viral these messages are, and [how] we can help in the future. We’re going to build a product that can help them double-down on the successful ones through social advertising,” Holmes said.

The Hootsuite CEO hinted that they also plan to introduce new functionality to the Hootsuite dashboard allowing mobile payments and e-commerce functionality.

Holmes said: “We have pole position in the market. I feel that if we take the throttle off then it opens an opportunity for people to try to catch us up. So we want to just completely put the throttle down and continue to offer the very best of breed of product in the market.”