Village Gamer

HootSuite has extended the functionality of their market-leading social media management system with a new wave of partner integrations. Joining their growing App Directory are MailChimp, Chime.in, Identi.ca, Vision Critical Surveys, and RSS Reader. These apps are available immediately to HootSuite’s Free, Pro, and Enterprise clients which now make up close to 4 million users worldwide.

• MailChimp – The MailChimp app for HootSuite allows users to view and search for recent campaigns, share campaigns to social networks, view campaign results and more.
• Chime.in – The Chime.in app for HootSuite allows users to schedule and send chimes, leave and view comments, preview photos, video and more.
• Identi.ca – The Identi.ca app for HootSuite allows you to post status updates, monitor timelines and messages, track your replies, view conversations and more.
• Vision Critical Surveys – The Vision Critical Surveys app for HootSuite allows you to easily share surveys with your social networks, monitor results in real-time and more.
• RSS Reader – The RSS Reader app for HootSuite provides a quick and easy way to view RSS feeds in the HootSuite dashboard, and share stories and articles from these feeds to your social networks.

“Businesses today are social. Success depends on connecting with customers instantly across multiple social media channels and networks. The growth of our App Directory gives clients an impressive arsenal of tools to do this, all in a single place,” says HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes.  “Our goal, as we close in on six million users by end of year, is to continue aggressively integrating leading apps, turning our dashboard into the mother of all SaaS resources for the social business.”   

“While we offer social capabilities and tracking inside our own application we know that the most important thing for small businesses is convenience. So many small businesses use HootSuite to manage and measure their brand’s presence on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and more. We’re excited that this integration will also allow them to manage the sharing of their email campaigns across those networks as well,” says MailChimp Head of Integrations and Partnerships, Amy Ellis.

HootSuite launched the App Directory in late 2011, enabling third-party developers to build extensions into the dashboard platform. Applications to date include Constant Contact, Chime.in, Digg, Flickr, Get Satisfaction, Identi.ca, InboxQ, MailChimp, Orkut, RSS Reader, TrendSpottr, Tumblr, Vision Critical Surveys, and YouTube. These complement HootSuite’s native social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ Pages.

In February 2012, HootSuite went a step further, opening up the Engagement API to expose core social network management, message publishing and scheduling functionality to third party platforms and applications.

The App Directory SDK has likewise been extended with better intercommunication between native HootSuite streams and App Directory streams. Users can now send specific tweets and posts from their HootSuite streams to app streams. This tighter coupling between HootSuite and integrated apps extends the power of both. Stay tuned: Apps are in the works that use this functionality for customer support, CRM, digital marketing, and analytics use cases.