Hootsuite 5 Delivers

Over the last year, Hootsuite has become my preferred (and recommend) social media Monitoring and Contribution Tool. The latest Hootsuite release delivers a great set of new features that enhances Hootsuite’s capabilities in Monitoring and Contribution. Of the five or six main features, the two most important are (1) the Facebook enhancements, and (2) the Google Analytics integration.

1. Facebook sharing enhancements: Hootsuite describes the new Facebook features as: “Share more on Facebook by including photo thumbnails plus titles, descriptions in wall posts, and view pictures and videos from friends in-stream”. These new capabilities are nice, but more importantly than the features, is the fact that  Hootsuite has evolved into a single tool that can be used for Contributing across all the key Social Media Channels (ie. they support LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace PingFM and WordPress). The new Facebook support makes the contributions deeper and more valuable in this important channel.

2. Google Analytics integration: Building on Hootsuite’s own metrics and campaign tracking (see the post”Tracking Social Media with Google Analytics and Hootsuite“) tools, Google Analytics integration is tremendously valuable for companies and individuals that need to tie their web site traffic to their social media activities. With this new integration, you can see graphs of your site traffic and associate them to specific tweets. You can also “slice and dice” your analytics data based on Source, Medium, Campaign and timeline.

All in all, this is a strong release and helps Hootsuite to continue their leadership position in the Social Media Contribution space.