It’s been a busy few months here at Hootsuite and I’m excited to share the updates to the Hootsuite product that have been achieved while we also adapt to our new world of remote work.

For starters, our customers will know that we recently released a whole new user interface. It was a key part of delivering a modern, cohesive, and seamless user experience – we listened to what our customers were wanting and I feel we’ve achieved that and more, but it’s not the only change we’re excited to launch.

Our focus this quarter has been on developing features that help our customers increase their social influence. Social influence is all about the value you can offer to your audience and, when it’s done right, it can be a powerful force in building a brand.

Hootsuite helps by making it easy to:

  • Create value-driven content that resonates with your audience
  • Share messages that encourage your community to keep the conversation going
  • Engage with your audience in ways that make them feel a personal connection to your brand
  • Encourage your followers to take action based on your messages

Let’s take a look at how some of our newest features support customers as they grow their social influence.

New Instagram publishing options

One-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories come from business profiles, making it a very important channel for our customers. That’s why we made it a priority to work with Instagram to integrate Stories into our platform.

You can now plan Instagram Stories within your entire social calendar, collaborate to ensure your posts are on-brand, and publish by mobile when you’re ready to go—all within Hootsuite.

More brands than ever are using Carousel publishing, too. So as of this fall, you can create and schedule up to 10 images or videos in a single Instagram post with Hootsuite, and publish via mobile.

Our goal is that these Instagram publishing options will mean you can spend more time creating the content that your audience values.

Better community management with Twitter

It’s now simpler to establish that all-important trust and build deeper connections with your followers on Twitter. With real-time Twitter direct message updates now in Inbox, you can respond faster and review the overall performance of your team with metrics like Inbound Messages, Mentions, Post Replies and Received DMs in team analytics.

Integrated social selling

Sellers are increasingly seeing the value in connecting with their buyers on social media, and using Hootsuite is an efficient way to manage those relationships. That’s why we brought Amplify, our social selling platform, into the Hootsuite dashboard with navigation that’s both consistent and intuitive.

For example, we’ve simplified the workflow by adding Amplify to Composer. Now you can post to Amplify from the same place you draft and post for your organization’s brand channels. From there, navigate easily to the Amplify Leaderboard in Analytics to monitor and scale your successful social selling program.

Making social listening easier

Making sense of online conversations can be tricky but we have some new features that will make the insights you need more accessible. These form part of Hootsuite Insights by Brandwatch, a platform we released earlier this year and continue to refine.

We heard from some users that error messages in the platform’s Search were hard to understand and correct. To help, we’ve made it clear which part of your search needs adjustment to find the mentions you want. These useful tips will help you fix any syntax errors and make future searches easier.

The second update we’re excited to launch next month is Iris, your new personal assistant when it comes to understanding conversations on social. Iris uses AI to take the guesswork out of social listening and helps you understand spikes in mentions by identifying the cause from your saved searches.

Improvements to analytics

Hootsuite Impact users that prioritize seeing paid and organic results in one place will appreciate this new update. You may have noticed that we’ve updated the icons for paid sources (now in black) and added extra text to make it clearer as well. These additions help you see at a glance whether reporting tiles are pulling from paid or organic sources.

A recap on that new UI

As I mentioned at the top of this article, I’m enormously proud of my team’s work on the new Hootsuite UI. Log in and you’ll find a unified and simplified left navigation that better emphasizes the core dashboard areas, an always-visible compose button on every screen, and a reimagined tabs section in Streams.

Overall, we tried to create an experience that is cleaner, with a modern look and feel. And we hope you agree! I encourage you to take a look around and let us know what you think.

Find out more

These are some of our biggest releases for Q3 but, with a lot going on, I haven’t captured everything.

For the full story on all the new updates – including features like an improved mobile experience and in-product assistance – I recommend watching our Q3 Product Roadmap webinar. And for the latest on what’s going live, it’s worth bookmarking our What’s New webpage, too.

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