HootSuite Buys uberVU To Add Analytics To Its Enterprise Social Media Management Platform
HootSuite — a platform for enterprises to manage their presence on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and many more — is ramping up its product offering with more big data.
Context & Ripple Effects
This acquisition extends an enterprise push HootSuite has been building since at least July 2012, when it deepened its business offering through integrations with Zendesk, Storify, and Evernote. The missing layer was measurement: the platform could publish and manage across Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, but rivals were already competing on insight — Sprout Social was expanding its suite with revenues doubling quarterly around the same period.
uberVU brings the real-time analytics and listening capability in-house rather than as a third-party add-on, converting HootSuite's distribution advantage into a data product. The pickup also matters because of its seat at the table with the networks themselves: since August 2012 HootSuite has been one of Twitter's partners for cross-selling ads, so owned analytics strengthen its position in that revenue relationship.
First-order effects
- Enterprise customers on HootSuite now get uberVU's social listening and analytics natively inside the dashboard they already use for publishing, removing a separate vendor purchase from their stack.
- Sprout Social and similar suite vendors face a competitor whose pitch shifts from 'manage your accounts' to 'measure them too,' pressuring them to match the bundled-analytics offer.
Second-order effects
- Twitter and Facebook gain a more valuable intermediary: as HootSuite layers analytics over their streams and cross-sells ads on Twitter's behalf, pricing power in the ecosystem tilts toward whoever controls the data pipes.
- Analytics startups without a publishing platform face a shrinking independent market, as buyers consolidate toward all-in-one tools and acquirers like HootSuite buy capability instead of building it.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, social media management consolidates from scheduling dashboards into full marketing-intelligence suites, with M&A — not product development — setting the pace of feature parity.
- The networks themselves become the structural bottleneck: any consolidated analytics layer depends on continued access to their APIs and data, giving Twitter and Facebook de facto regulatory power over the category.
The trend: Social media management is shifting from publishing tools to data-driven marketing platforms, with acquisitions of analytics vendors deciding which players can serve the enterprise.