Tencent Weibo has over 540 million registered accounts; VK.com has over 200 million registered accounts.

“Adding Tencent Weibo and VK.com to our lineup lets our users expand their reach around the world,” Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said in a statement. “Social has no boundaries. In fact, HootSuite has users in nearly every country worldwide, and is available in 15 languages and counting.”

HootSuite, which recently unveiled swanky new digs in Vancouver, Canada, is already integrated with other regional social networks such as Sina Weibo and Renren in China, Orkut, which maintains a foothold in Brazil, Viadeo, and Xing. And today, the company announced a new language: Russian.

Major brands that use Tencent Weibo include the NBA, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Red Bull, and HootSuite says 79 of the Fortune 100 are its clients. The company grew sales to enterprise clients under $10 billion 272 percent and enterprises over $10 billion 900 percent in the first quarter of 2013, as new VP of marketing, Dee Anna McPherson — formerly of Yammer, helps accelerate its deployment into and within corporations.

The company’s Tencent Weibo integration includes such new features as posting and scheduling updates, viewing and leaving comments on posts, searching and filtering content, and using multiple profiles. For VK.com, HootSuite supports posting status updates, viewing and posting comments, liking updates, and monitoring news and updates.

“With our newest app integrations, you can use HootSuite to connect with hundreds of millions of users on the biggest social networks in China and Russia,” Holmes said.

HootSuite recently surpassed the six million user mark.

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc

That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

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The popular social media management tool that just passed six million users is growing fast, CEO Ryan Holmes told me today, and needed more space for future expansion.

“We just moved in … the dust is still settling,” Holmes says. “In 2012 we went from 100 to 250 employees, and this year at a minimum we’ll close out at 350.”

HootSuite bought an old police station in Vancouver’s eastside and gave it a $1 million facelift, adding a private yoga studio, gym, and yes, the obligatory startup office nap room. Oh, and don’t forget: free beer on Fridays, on tap in the kitchen.

Here’s the new HootSuite digs, in pictures:

Note the the social media icons pillows in the lobby? HootSuite partners YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are clearly visible, plus a few others.

Image credit: HootSuite

McPherson, whose LinkedIn profile still shows her at Yammer, led marketing at that company for the past three years. Prior to that she was a partner at the Horn Group, a PR firm, and a senior vice president at Ogilvy PR. She also spent three years as a director of public relations at PeopleSoft.

“Dee Anna is a dream fit — she put enterprise social networking on the map at Yammer and will help HootSuite continue to expand its penetration into social enterprises,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

Among her accomplishments at Yammer were the acquisition of the company by Microsoft for $1.2 billion and a healthy 300 percent annual growth rate.

HootSuite, which recently became one of only a handful of Twitter Ad API partners, took some steps closer to inside-the-company Yammer territory last year with its Conversations feature. This hire, however, is almost certainly not about HootSuite becoming more Yammer-like but about HootSuite continuing its growth inside large enterprises. Seventy-nine of the Fortune 100 already use HootSuite, but there’s a lot of room to grow deeper and broader.

Source: LinkedIn

Dee Anna McPherson

“I’m thrilled to join HootSuite during a period of such incredible growth,” said McPherson in a rather predictable PR-speak quote. “There’s no position I’d rather be in than heading up a talented team working to cement an innovative product at the head of the pack for enterprise social media management.”

One question: Where will she work?

McPherson is San Francisco-based, while HootSuite is Vancouver-based. HootSuite does have a San Francisco office but has indicated in the past that it has no intention of moving senior staff. That said, all of its top people spend time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley regularly, and it would not be unusual for McPherson to simply reverse that trend, working in San Francisco while occasionally visiting Vancouver.

One quick tip for the long-time PR pro: How about a LinkedIn photo sans redeye?

HootSuite continues to grow both users and headcount, with over six million users and now 250 employees, up from just 70 at the start of last year.

photo credit: Blue Genie Art via photopin cc

“The new integration allows stakeholders in social businesses to instantly buy promoted tweets and accounts from their HootSuite dashboard using our secure, role-based team workflow,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

Holmes said that Hootsuite has been working with Twitter for some time on this functionality, beta-testing it with a small group of enterprise customers. Only selected customers (at least at first) can use the new functionality, which will help companies and their brands amplify owned media via paid media.

For more on the new Twitter Ads API that was announced today — and the other API partners — check this story

“We’re opening it up to our enterprise customers out of the gates,” Holmes said. “Our Fortune 5,000 type of users will get it first … and we look to open it up to our hundreds of thousands of other paying customers as soon as possible.”

The upgraded HootSuite dashboard defines roles and permissions, and agencies, content producers, and executives can collaborate in using new paid features. That’ll be important, as companies can quickly spend a very significant amount of money on Twitter campaigns. Promoted trends can cost tens of thousands of dollars per day, while promoted accounts and promoted tweets are charged on a cost-per-action basis.

As people are creating or scheduling content, they will see an option to advertise or promote that content, set some criteria such as budget, and make their purchases. Companies will also be able to promote older content or content that fans or clients have posted on Twitter, Holmes said.

Interestingly, the advertising accounts are set up with Twitter via Twitters new Ads API, which ensures that the advertising companies are Twitter’s customers, not HootSuite’s. Holmes said that at least initially, HootSuite is not planning to monetize Twitter ads running through its dashboard.

“We believe developers and partners are an important extension of our products, and we’re thrilled to give them the tools to manage and create Twitter Ad campaigns through existing in-house solutions,” Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue, said in a statement. “We are excited to build upon our partnership with HootSuite and see their ability to help nontraditional marketers use Promoted Products as an exciting opportunity for both companies and our users.”

Hootsuite is probably the most popular social media management platform for brands, with over five million users, including 1,500 agency partners and Fortune 500 clients like McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Virgin. The company says that 79 of the Fortune 100 companies are clients, and one poll said that HootSuite was the most popular Twitter client.

Holmes said today that over 1.1 billion tweets have been sent via HootSuite, and users are sending over three million more each day.

Photo: Ryan Holmes, by HootSuite

Buffer started as simply a way to buffer or space out your social tweets and shares, with some intelligence that, over time, ensured your updates published at optimal times for maximum engagement. But when HootSuite added auto-scheduling this summer, that specific niche started narrowing.

So Buffer re-engaged with partners, adding a big Twitter client as a partner, plus 49 other developer-partners such as Reeder, Pocket, and Feedly. And now the service is relaunching with a different focus and a different flavor.

“We’ve been working on this for the past six months,” Buffer co-founder Leonhard Widrich told me via email. “We’ve been collecting tons of data of how Buffer was used, how our now 50 partner developers … have gotten usage through our API, and where we see the future of sharing on the social web.”

The result is a refocus as a sharing platform.

Buffer doesn’t want to be a destination anymore; it wants to be a conduit. Content that initially needed to be posted at Buffer’s site or through the app is increasingly coming in via Buffer buttons in browsers or partner integrations. In fact, over 40 percent of the content that flows through the system is already posted via the API, Widrich told me, and that trend is increasing rapidly.

So the actual Buffer app is now refocusing on analytics and some cool social sharing jiu-jitsu. Here are some examples:

Buffer now reveals your top posts across all networks:

With a very cool new user interface, the new Buffer allows you to drag and drop updates from one social account into another:

And, smartly, copy top performing posts from Facebook, for example, to Twitter, to see if they get good engagement there:

It’s a smart upgrade, and it still comes with the benefit of optimum scheduling and release of updates, which should improve engagement with your audience, or just your friends.

But what I really like is that Buffer is adding some real user interface and user experience panache to a social sharing market dominated by HootSuite (which, full disclosure, I use frequently). Although HootSuite does a lot more than simply sharing social updates, its UI and UX leave a lot to be desired.

With 400,000 users compared to HootSuite’s five million, it’s up to Buffer to show that it can compete with the big boys.

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

With HootSuite Directory apps, social media content creators can create, publish, and promote social content all within one interface. For instance, the Vimeo app allows users to “upload videos, search for and view videos within the dashboard, share videos to your social network, and more,” according to HootSuite.

“At HootSuite we hold content creators dear to our hearts, so we’re thrilled to be able to bring tools like Vimeo and WordPress.org, staples of the creative community, into our App Directory,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

HootSuite’s app directory just celebrated its first anniversary and now integrates with 41 popular web services such as Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Slideshare. The company’s five million customers use the apps as well, with 10-15 percent of new users installing an app within the first week, according to Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners.

The WordPress.org tool is particularly significant. WordPress is the biggest blogging tool on the planet, handling something like 17 percent of web traffic. The .org part refers to self-hosted blogs, but WordPress.com hosted blogs are also included.

And for those social media marketers who are turning to Pinterest to engage with fans, the Reachli app will be of interest. It helps marketers create campaigns and view metrics such as clicks, likes, repins, and total reach.

HootSuite Command Center allows you to listen and monitor social mentions, publish and engage with fans and consumers, and analyze and measure the results. In addition, it’ll allow you to easily display a simple dashboard in key areas of your company.

Or on mobile devices from from iPhone to Android.

The goal, according to HootSuite chief executive Ryan Holmes, is to give companies “a hub where every social interaction can be seen, studied and spread.”

HootSuite Command Center

For example, a marketing team could monitor the virality of their every campaign in realtime. Public relations executives could see trending sentiment to recent announcements, and social media teams can see and react to trending topics as they surface. And companies can ensure internal audiences are up-to-speed with and engaged in external social media initiatives.

All of which is possible today, of course, with a variety of tools.

But Command Center’s goal is to integrate crisis management, campaign execution, executive reporting, and market research, and other capabilities into one single engine. And it continues HootSuite’s recently more-aggressive push into the enterprise, which includes internal corporate social networking with HootSuite Conversations, introduced just six weeks ago.

That’s a reality echoed by Holmes, who said that “HootSuite continues to develop and acquire tools to support the growing needs of today’s social businesses.”

No evil laugh or dictator suite required.

photo credit: SkinheadSportBiker1 via photopin cc

If you haven’t heard of the tool, Buffer saves your tweets, posts, and shares in order to automatically publish them at times that maximize retweets, likes, and comments. That allows social media users to post any content at any time, secure in the knowledge that they won’t either overburden followers or miss the biggest opportunities to get their attention.

Source: Buffer

Buffering tweets in TweetCaster

This is a big integration for Buffer, and co-founder Leonhard Widrich is exited about the integration, which is in line with the company’s strategic goal of working with as many partners as possible:

“I think it’ll be really amazing to finally allow people to Buffer retweets and Tweets straight from one of the best Twitter clients on the web, which was one of the most requested features over the past few months.”

TweetCaster profiles itself as “the #1 mobile Twitter app” with millions of downloads and users, and features innovative functionality such as “zip it,” which allows you to simply not see messages from a particular follower or fan for a period of time.

TweetCaster can also cross-post to multiple social networks, search in very fine-grained ways just for images, or videos, or topics — features unavailable from Twitter itself.

Buffer, which has been around for some time, saw some competition when HootSuite, the social media management tool, added “AutoSchedule,” a function that does much the same thing. But HootSuite is focused on social media managers and marketers, while Buffer is focused on individual social media users.

One question that remains: How will Twitter’s recent API changes affect TweetCaster? Twitter has made it clear that the consumer/consumption space is one that it intends to own itself, with its own tools … and TweetCaster seems to be right in the crosshairs of that particular initiative.

However, by its very success, TweetCaster may have won itself some degree of special treatment. Twitter has no desire to anger its own users, whatever tool they’re using, and killing a popular Twitter client — the most popular, according to TweetCaster — would certainly generate PR problems.

(I’ve asked TweetCaster chief executive Evan Conway for a comment and will update if we hear from him.)

photo credit: Vainsang via photopin cc

The new tools allow HootSuite users to take conversations “offline,” sharing something from Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere on the web to a select group of internal company personnel. They also allow quick real-time chat and promise to galvanize company employees into brand ambassadors.

One of the goals, HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes told me, was simplicity.

“Our product is now three and a half years old,” he said. “It started as a tool for our team to help manage social media, but we’ve grown a lot. We spend two to three hours a day in the tool, and when we leave it’s to jump into email … to send something we found on a social network.”

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite Conversations

HootSuite Conversations skips the email step, keeping the discussion in a web native social tool where any results of the conversation can immediately be shared out to social networks as desired.

“As we look at where we’ve come from,” Holmes says, “Social is now spreading across the whole business. We need better tools for managing that.”

The strategy from HootSuite seems to be to concentrate all of a users’s social activity in one tool. It’s not a serious competitive threat, if any threat at all, to a true intranet or inside-social tool, although one quote in the press release from a Pepsi exec seems to indicate that organizations can use it to communicate with their employees.

However, HootSuite — even with Conversations —  is not currently the kind of tool that everyone in an enterprise will ever need or have. What it does is simplify the communication for social media or marketing teams, especially if the team needs to collaborate on social media messaging before releasing tweets or status updates.

And the new functionality probably will perk up a few ears in the social enterprise space.

Source: HootSuite

Sending messages out that originated inside the organization

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

VentureBeat: Why’d you buy Seesmic?

Ryan Holmes: As I went into discussions with Loic around where they were at, it seemed like an opportunity to help migrate some of their users over – specifically the business users. Seesmic has a broad spectrum of small, medium, and enterprise users in their user base.

We still have to determine exactly how many. We’re not really looking for casual or consumer users.

VentureBeat: What about Loic? Is he staying?

Holmes: He’s helping us with the transition, helping us with buzz. As you know, Loic’s a PR force of nature. [Laughs]

He’s very well networked in the Bay Area, and we’ve been frenemies over the past couple of years — more friends than enemies — and we’d go for jogs, laugh and share war stories.

VentureBeat: So he could join HootSuite in some capacity?

Holmes: That’s correct.

VentureBeat: I know you’re not releasing the price, but can you give us the neighborhood?

Holmes: There’s been a lot of speculation on that, but we’re not commenting. Some have guessed in the $15 million range to the low millions, but we’re not releasing the number.

However, the more Seesmic users we convert over to HootSuite users, the higher the price will be.

VentureBeat: Will you be keeping Seesmic’s San Francisco office?

Holmes: We’re definitely starting an office in S.F. We have offices in London and N.Y. and Australia, but historically, I and my team have been going down to San Francisco every week or two.

I look forward to being down there more and more frequently, but we’re keeping engineering, marketing, and inside sales in Vancouver.

VentureBeat: And the people who are currently working at Seesmic?

Holmes: We’re trying to assess who would be an interesting fit for us — they have some very smart people. There’s a couple I want to reach out to and see if there’s a fit within HootSuite.

VentureBeat: What technology from Seesmic do you think you’ll use?

Holmes: We’re going to keep the products up for the next foreseeable while, but we will migrate the users over eventually.

There’s some interesting technology there, but this was not primarily a tech acquisition.

VentureBeat: Anything else you’d like to share?

Holmes: With Twitter’s four-quadrant positioning, we’re probably going to see some more roll-up … we’re going to see some people in the other quadrants looking for what they do with their products and companies over the next while.

We may see more people selling their companies.

Fortunately, we’ve always been focused on the quadrant they’re not directly interested in, the analytics and engagement side of the space.

photo credit: Hamed Saber via photo pin cc

Seesmic, led by charismatic chief executive Loic Le Meur, who also runs Le Web conference in Paris, is the king of the pivot, starting life as video commenting tool, becoming a Twitter client, transitioning to a client for social services in general, transmogrifying (yes, I’m running out of synonyms here) into a customer relationship management system, and most recently, transforming back into a social media cross-posting tool via its Ping.fm acquisition.

That, of course, is very close to what HootSuite does, and while HootSuite’s press release didn’t disclose any details, Ping.fm’s capability to post to many, many sites may be the value HootSuite’s acquiring.

In addition, while Seesmic’s team was just halved, there’s still talent for HootSuite to aqui-hire. There’s no word on this yet, but the acquisition also gives Vancouver, Canada-based HootSuite a foothold in San Francisco.

I have a conversation with HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes scheduled for tomorrow, and we’ll post more details then.

Le Meur had nice words for Holmes and HootSuite:

“We’ve always been big fans of Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team, since the days we were all pioneering the social media landscape. We’re thrilled today to announce that Seesmic is joining HootSuite, and we’re excited for our users: They are becoming part of the HootSuite family, and they will be able to continue to build their brand and social business.”

And Holmes had nice words for Le Meur and Seesmic:

“I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmic’s CEO, Loïc Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business. We are thrilled to welcome Seesmic’s users into the HootSuite family.”

The one pertinent detail, other than the plain fact of the acquisition itself that can be derived from the press release, is contained in Le Meur’s statement that Seesmic users will become HootSuite users (“part of the HootSuite family”).

This suggests that HootSuite will shutter Seesmic as a product.

That seems to be the only common sense solution, given that HootSuite has almost five million users, and Seesmic has been floundering for years, with only perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 unique visitors a month.

Other than those two paragraphs, literally 90 percent of the release is about HootSuite’s product, pricing, and clients.

More details tomorrow.

Image credit: Big fish eating little fish/ShutterStock

Integrating with Zendesk will enable users to easily move a customer service-related tweet or status update to a ticketing and tracking system, Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integrations, told VentureBeat.

The integration with Storify could be used by marketing personnel to create comprehensive, auto-updating lenses into evolving issues or projects. And connecting with Evernote helps anyone working with social to quickly save an important post into their own personal database.

The new integrations are a big step for the Vancouver-based company in two directions.

First, they take HootSuite deeper into the enterprise, integrating into corporate systems like Zendesk, and pushing the reach and impact of social beyond the marketing and customer service teams to product management, development, or fulfillment teams.

Secondly, they’re the first integrations that are not third-party-created apps that operating solely within the flow of social messages inside HootSuite. Instead, they are plugins that take content from the stream of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ messages inside HootSuite and deliver it to external, third-party applications.

In a statement Ryan Holmes, HootSuite’s chief executive, said that “with the addition of app plugins, we’re making it possible for our users to monitor their social media properties from the dashboard, then delegate messages for additional handling in external, third party applications.”

HootSuite is excited by the potential, Holder says, and these will soon be joined by more plugins that can take advantage of additional tie-ins with external applications. New apps would likely be in the areas of customer support, CRM, digital marketing, publishing, and content curation, the company said in a statement.

I asked Holder how many of those almost five million users he expected to start using the new integrations.

“What we’ve seen on all our integrations is that we get enormous pickup – 10-15 percent of new HootSuite users install apps within the first week, and I would probably expect 10-15 percent of our users to install these apps within the first week.”

Some screenshots of the new integrations:

And an explanatory video:

Image credit: VLADGRIN/ShutterStock, Andre Blais/ShutterStock

“Instead of our users manually selecting what time they want to schedule or post their social media messages,” HootSuite chief executive Ryan Holmes said in a statement, “they can use our new AutoScheduler to optimize and automate the scheduling process.”

That’s a major benefit, because expert social media marketers know, along with the Teacher, that there is a time for everything. That’s the reason you never start a Facebook campaign on Friday, and it’s also why almost everything you know about marketing on Facebook is wrong for Twitter. Certain times — often evening and weekends — are best for Facebook engagement. Other times, including mornings, are better for Twitter.

Each of the social networks has its own community and rhythm, making it challenging both to know the best publishing moments and to execute on them.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s auto-schedule capability

Functionality to automatically schedule for optimum engagement was first available via Buffer. The Buffer App tweets and shares for you when the time is right and you’re most likely to get engagement. But now Buffer is getting serious competition from HootSuite.

AutoSchedule will analyze both your social activity and that of your followers. Based on that data, it will automatically deliver each message to your fans and followers at “an optimal time in order to maximize reach and avoid swamping followers with too many updates.”

The functionality will first be available in HootSuite’s browser extension, the Hootlet. Installed in your browser — HootSuite supports either Chrome or Firefox — it allows you to tweet and share to social networks. Later this summer, HootSuite will embed similar functionality in its main dashboard.

According to HootSuite, “it’s a surefire way to get the most out of social media initiatives.”

It’s also a surefire way to put extra pressure on the much smaller Buffer.

Image credit: Oleksiy Mark/ShutterStock

Rather, the social media management company and the inbound marketing firm are holding a seminar on inbound marketing and social media … and they’re inviting the world. Or at least enough of the world to break the Guinness record for most attendees of a live webinar.

Source: HootSuite

Dan Zarrella

Currently, the record stands at 10,899. HubSpot should know: It set the record itself in 2011. Now, with HootSuite’s four million users, the companies are attempting to hit 17,000 attendees.

VentureBeat spoke to HootSuite’s VP of marketing, Ben Watson.

“Theoretically, we could shoot for 10,900 and break the record by one, but we want to go all the way to 17,000. We’ve had massive registration already … we’re in the tens of thousands.”

The seminar is focused on bringing social and in-bound marketing together, Watson said. According to a video HootSuite has produced about the seminar, it will help digital marketers examine where they are using social versus where they should be using social, learn how to optimize for fan engagement, and drive increased inbound marketing results.

“We wanted to give something back, to go deep into the data and help people find insights that, unless you could spend $100,000 on an analyst contract, you would probably never get,” Watson told VentureBeat. “We want to help people close the loop with social, demonstrate how to do cross-platform engagement, and truly build a relationship with their customers.”

Source: HootSuite

Ben Watson

The seminar will feature both Watson and HubSpot’s “social media scientist,” Dan Zarrella.

And the technology necessary for the world’s largest webinar?

“We’re using some custom technology that’s been put together by a HubSpot partner specifically for this,” Watson said. “For the big ones, you really need to go custom, to find ways to distribute load and manage that many attendees.”

If you’re interested in the topic or in being part of a Guinness world record, register here: The Science of Inbound Marketing. The seminar is on Thursday, July 12.

Here’s the promo video for the webinar:

The company provides a unified interface where social media managers can monitor and manage their activity across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Additional social networks can be added via apps in the HootSuite App Directory, enabling users to manage YouTube, Flickr, and others.

Instagram is a big integration for HootSuite, as the service continues to grow in popularity, currently adding five million users a week. And SlideShare is a major platform for sharing presentations and PowerPoint decks.

Plus, since HootSuite already helps its clients manage their LinkedIn presence, and LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for $119 million earlier this year, it was a natural next step.

In a statement, chief executive Ryan Holmes said the company picked these networks to add to the App Directory because they enable the sharing of rich media content that aids engagement:

“We’re excited to welcome these popular social networks because they’re centrally focused around the easy sharing of multimedia content.”

The Instagram app will allow users to view and search photos, read what others have written, add comments, like photos, and share them to other social networks. Similarly, the SlideShare app helps users upload, find, and share content

The App Directory is one of the ways HootSuite distinguishes itself from competitors such as SproutSocial and Involver. Perhaps the only competitor with something similar is Radian6, with its Extension Gallery. Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, told VentureBeat that “roughly 10-15% of new users install at least one app within the first week.”

Created in December of last year, the App Directory features apps for integrating email marketing, surveys, RSS feeds, and more into users’ social media management activities. There’s even an app to manage Orkut, the Google-owned Brazilian social network.

The additions of Zuum and Edocr are a bit surprising.

Zuum is somewhat interesting, as it is a platform for social media marketing strategy, which is somewhat competitive to HootSuite, but it also provides insight into guaranteed-to-be-engaging content, helping social media managers know what kinds of content they should post.

Edocr, on the other hand, is a tiny business-document sharing site focused on lead generation, with only some thousands of monthly visitors. I’ve asked HootSuite why it chose Edocr and Zuum, and I’ll update this post when the company replies.

[ Update: the response was inconclusive. According to Holder, "Instagram and SlideShare have been among the top requested apps from our Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.” ]

I did ask the company when full Google+ integration is coming to HootSuite, but there is no specific timetable yet. Holder had the following to say via email:

We are not able to provide a specific date at this time as to when Google+ will be available to all HootSuite users. HootSuite was selected as an official partner by Google+ Pages, and we are currently working with their team to gather data from our current Enterprise clients actively using the integration.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has almost 200 employees. In March of this year, the company raised $20 million from OMERS Ventures.

Image credit: ShutterStock

“We’re focused on power user functionality,” said Ryan Holmes, CEO and founder of Invoke Media, the company behind HootSuite. “We don’t want to confine you to any one interface.”

Since launching in December, HootSuite has become the sixth-most popular way to interact with Twitter, behind iPhone app and Mac client Tweetie and TweetDeck, according to TwitStat. In fact, the White House uses it.

With HootSuite, you can invite other people to edit tweets without handing over password information, so more than one person can be responsible for a company’s brand. HootSuite also owns the ow.ly URL shortener so it can provide statistical feedback on how many people clicked on links shared through Twitter and the geographical breakdown of visitors. Another useful function is scheduled tweeting for company announcements.

Like competitor TweetDeck, you can create groups of Twitter accounts to follow. Say you want to follow tweets from only your co-workers or tweets from local foodies, you can put their Twitter usernames into a group and create a column around that subject.

Invoke Media was founded in 2000 and has seven employees working on HootSuite. The company is currently looking for a Series A round of funding for the product.