Hootsuite hints at Instagram integration as brands continue video content charge
Hootsuite is working on integrating Instagram into its social media dashboard as the use of video content gathers apace amongst brand marketers.
After analysing the growing success of video and image-led content being used by its customers, Hootsuite began to look at how it could optimise that content within its own dashboard, Dee Anna McPherson, vice president of marketing told The Drum.
“Video is typically the most engaging content so it makes perfect sense that brands are going to move in that direction. It also very much humanises it beyond what you can put in a few characters, so anything including an image or video has been wildly popular.
“We are always thinking [about] how can we optimise the video content or the image content within the dashboard… you’ll be seeing some interesting things coming from us with Instagram because we do see the popularity of that type of content, [and think about] how can we optimise that experience through the Hootsuite dashboard. “
Hootsuite is the latest social site to ramp up video content; just this week Twitter heralded 2015 as “the year of video” for the social network and announced a raft of enhancements to its video products. Facebook too, which saw one billion daily video views in 2014, has been leading the charge and recently acquired start-up Quickfire Network to capitalise on the firm’s video compression expertise.
Acquiring start-ups to utilise their services has also been a trend at Hootsuite. In 2014, following a $60m financing round, the social dashboard bought a number of companies, including social telephony start-up Zeetl to help brands better manage their customer service. Competition from the inventive start-up community is also something that McPherson admitted Hootsuite was “worried about” and so established Hootsuite Labs to make sure it was on the “bleeding-edge” of social media.
“The thing we’re worried about the most is what the next start-up is going to do. So we established a team called Hootsuite Labs… they focus on emerging trends, and work outside core development. They are the innovators because that’s something that we worry about.”
Created in March last year, Hootsuite Labs has created a series of new products including Hootlet, a free Chrome Extension that allows users to easily share and schedule content to multiple social networks from anywhere on the web.