BC Business
Top 20 Innovators in BC, Hootsuite Media
Congratulations to Hootsuite Media, #10 in 2011's Most Innovative Companies in B.C.
It’s been a very busy time for this darling of the Vancouver tech scene. Its social media dashboard crossed the one-million-user mark last November and it is now handling over one million individual messages a day. 2010 saw its expansion to four major mobile platforms (iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android), as well as local versions in 11 languages. All of which confirms CEO Ryan Holmes’s core idea that businesses will pay for software that makes sense of social media.
Designed to aggregate accounts and simplify messaging, HootSuite organizes the cacophonous world of Facebook and Twitter (among a host of other platforms) and gives businesses a tool to engage in the conversation efficiently. Some of the features that users pay for include sophisticated monitoring of stats such as click-throughs and mentions and the ability to manage workflow within a team.
HootSuite uses a “freemium” model where most users get limited features for free but a small minority (two per cent in this case) pay for premium features. That might not seem like an obvious path to big profits, but HootSuite’s two per cent are a nice group of premium users to have. It includes the White House, for instance.
What earned this dynamo a repeat appearance on our list (it came in at No. 5 last year) was their relentless determination in pushing the product forward. According to one of our panellists, “In a crowded market, HootSuite is probably the most aggressive in terms of product development and putting out new features.” The social web moves fast, and these guys are showing that they can keep up.