Last week, I put forth Instagram as one of the few services that enables cross-posting to Twitter and Facebook, as well as Sina Weibo. This time around, let’s look at Hubblr, a social media dashboard that offers rare integration with both Western and Chinese services.
Given the constantly growing list of social platforms we need to keep track of, there’s a viable market for tools that simplify management of social networking accounts across multiple services. The ready adoption of social media by brands and businesses has also spurred the creation of premium and professional level services.
HootSuite, which recently acquired Seesmic, has distinguished itself in the space. The service does have support for Japanese social network Mixi, but it has yet to add China’s homegrown social services. Sprout Social is another such service, but it also doesn’t yet fuse the East and the West.
Australian startup Hubblr is up for the task. In addition to the usual suspects (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), its Web-based social media dashboard supports Sina Weibo and Renren. Its social media management tool is still young, but the inclusion of Chinese services should be invaluable to companies, or even specific users, that are looking to reach the fast-growing market.
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Hubblr offers a unified feed, post scheduling, filtering and communication between internal accounts. One handy feature is the creation of “hub” groups that can be managed and monitored individually.
The service is also built to help users keep track of engagement, offering reports on interactions, activity and followers. The actual implementation, however, still needs some work, as it never actually began tracking mentions from my Twitter account during my testing, as you can see in the above screenshot.
Similar to Tweetdeck, you can customize a set of columns on the Hubblr dashboard to monitor different feeds or keyword searches, as well as keep track of other functions like scheduled messages. Hubblr also includes a built-in translation feature, which should be convenient for social media managers working across different countries and cultures.
Hubblr got its start targeting large corporations, but it is now opening up to small businesses or even individual users. Backed by angel investors, it has ambitious goals that will reach beyond just the US and China.
“Our vision is to create one platform where anybody can plug in to any social network and use it,” CEO Michael Lam said in an interview, adding that it’s a “fairly lofty goal.”
It sounds to me like ‘One service to rule them all’, but that might just be the Lord of the Rings geek in me talking. Anyway, Hubblr supports just a handful of services right now, but, in keeping with its long-term vision, it’s currently working on adding more.
Not everyone needs the full power of a social media dashboard, and still others will be content with Hootsuite and other similar services. However, Hubblr’s unique integration with popular Chinese services should give it a tidy corner of the market for now.
Header image via Flickr / Dog Company
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