Marketing partnerships to play a role in making Vancouver’s social darling even bigger
Vancouver-based social media management firm HootSuite says it will focus on international expansion, accelerating product growth and innovation and strategic acquisitions after securing US$165 million in Series B funding.
New York’s Insight Venture Partners (an investor in Tumblr and Twitter) led the latest funding round, with participation from Accel Partners and existing investor OMERS Ventures.
Insight and Accel (the first institutional investor in Facebook and its largest pre-IPO owner) are new investors in HootSuite, while OMERS is continuing a partnership began in 2012.
The funding comes amid continued inroads into the marketing community by the four-year-old company. HootSuite, which specializes in social media management and listening, currently ranks at 237 on the Fortune 500 among its enterprise customer base, including PepsiCo, Virgin, Orange, Sony Music and HBO.
In July, privately held HootSuite announced that it had surpassed seven million global users while revenues increased 300% over the corresponding year-earlier period. Matt Switzer, vice-president of corporate development, said that marketing partners play a key role in fueling the company’s growth.
“We’ve had an opportunity to work with amazing companies over the course of the last three years and were continuing to expand,” he said. “There’s a strong value proposition for bringing the tool that you use to create and share content together with the mechanism that you use to amplify it.
“We think that value proposition is strong and we’re excited to enhance that and put it in the advertisers’ hands.”
Switzer said that the latest funding would go towards growing HootSuite’s product roster as well as growing the company through what he called “strategic acquisitions.” Its most recent acquisition was San Francisco-based Seesmic, a four-year start-up it purchased for an undisclosed amount in September.
HootSuite also remains focused on international growth, which Switzer predicted would be a “persistent theme” in coming years. The company currently employs approximately 320 people at offices in Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, London and Sydney. It expects to add to that over the next 6-12 months, said Switzer.
He said that both Asia and Latin America represent growth opportunities for the company, along with continued investment in Europe.
HootSuite is also aggressively expanding into the social ads business, and was one of five Twitter Ads API partners when the program was announced in February. “We’re definitely interested in the social business and also social advertising,” said Switzer. “We’re evaluating things all the time and we see a ton of opportunities out there.”
