The buzzword in today's social media marketing is engagement. Today's announcement of the acquisition of Brightkit by Hootsuite is driven by the desire to extend the platform's social marketing capabilities and help organizations drive more engagement. We take a first look in this week's SMToolbox.
Hootsuite has become the most popular social management tool in the world with over 10 million users in 175 countries. Its freemium model has been very successful, almost everyone I know has a hootlet in their browser bar, often along with other share extensions from competing tools.
Brightkit has been available as a Hootsuite app for the last year to develop contests and sweepstakes to support, manage and moderate campaigns in real-time. The integration and launch of Hootsuite campaigns allows marketers to develop a wide range social contests, sweepstakes, and galleries to engage users, attract followers and create new leads. Campaigns is integrated with Hootsuite's main dashboard, so you can monitor campaigns, engage and create outreach lists from the one location.
Hootsuite Campaigns is designed to support:
social media galleries that aggregate mentions and media based on specific hashtags (you can moderate before they appear)
contests that encourage participation and sharing, and which allow monitoring and targeting of messages to increase engagement
managing and moderating the social campaigns from the Hootsuite dashboard plus exporting campaign data for further analysis and action
The key is ensuring campaigns generate not just awareness and engagement but real leads and customers. This requires good planning and follow up; otherwise, there is a danger that people will engage with a contest but not with the brand. Hootsuite Campaigns gives organizations an integrated suite of tools to generate and manage effective engagement.
To find out more visit you can register for the webinar overview or visit Hootsuite Campaigns.