HootSuite launches ‘Teams’ toolkit for serious business users

Social media management dashboard HootSuite is continuing its push out into the corporate social sphere by rolling out HootSuite Teams, a toolkit it says is aimed at “serious business collaboration”.

Launched in 2008, HootSuite is a platform that lets users manage multiple social networks through a single dashboard, and the Vancouver-based company has grown into a global social media brand used by individuals and companies alike.

Earlier this year, HootSuite hit 3 million signups, off the back of one million new accounts in the previous six months, before going on to release its engagement API, enabling its core social network management, publishing and scheduling features in third party platforms and applications.

With HootSuite Teams, the company is striving to help social media managers in global companies through introducing a slew of new features.

One of the key selling points of Teams is that it offers more powerful permission settings – for example, users will be able to control who can post what to which networks. This will, of course, have implications for helping to prevent rogue tweets from summer interns. It also comes with a built-in approval feature to align all messages before posting, with global, top-down controls.

In addition, HootSuite Teams lets managers assign incoming messages among team members for follow-up, with a view towards controlling customer complaints. It also helps users plan social media campaigns in advance with new scheduling features.

Whilst HootSuite can be used for free by individuals simply looking to centralize all their social networking activity within a single platform, the company says that its corporate clients have tripled over the past year, with two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies now using it.

Particularly within larger international companies, social media teams can be decentralized – with users updating multiple accounts from different locations and different departments. And this is the problem HootSuite is seeking to solve with Teams.

“This is a product that’s overdue and clearly needed,” says Ryan Holmes, HootSuite’s founder and CEO. “Social media used to be one intern, now it’s multi-million-dollar teams at the planet’s largest companies. Customers are asking for enterprise-grade support, and Teams is a powerful, intuitive solution.”