Social media platform Hootsuite has announced its recent acquisition of BrightKit, a solutions-based company that delivers customised social marketing campaigns to its clients. Rather than keep the original brand as it is, Hootsuite are incorporating it under their own umbrella and are calling the service Hootsuite Campaigns.
Hootsuite Campaigns will be able to deliver marketing campaigns to social media clients: Bright These will include user-generated galleries, sweepstakes and competitions. The technology will allow marketers to manage campaigns from build and management through to measurement of the effectiveness of the campaigns, all of which will be operated from the Hootsuite dashboard.
This most recent acquisition comes at a successful time for Hootsuite; they recently reached 10 million users worldwide and are in a strong financial position as their acquisition strategy shows. Alongside Brightkit they have also recently acquired social telephony business Zeetl. It’s not simply through purchases that they are planning to extend however, they are also committed to ambitious organic growth plans.
CEO Ryan Holmes disclosed plans to extend their geographical reach:
“We’re seeing explosive growth across all regions. Our teams are focused on rolling out a number of new product offerings, have plans to open operations in Latin-America and will hire an additional 100+ roles by the end of 2014.”
BrightKit counted some 100 brands under its client roster. No doubt Hootsuite will plan to greatly increase this number. They already have their own enterprise clients, including high profile names such as the Cambridge University Press and New York Libraries. They serve a global custom base in 175 countries.