Hootsuite unveils Facebook ad tool ‘for human beings’

Social media platform Hootsuite, which has offered a Twitter ad tool only for its enterprise users, is today announcing a Facebook ad tool for its entire userbase of more than eleven million.

The new Hootsuite Ads tool is streamlined for adoption by almost anyone across an organization who wants to quickly run a Promoted Post.

To do so, a user simply selects an objective: reach more people, get more followers, drive engagement, or increase website traffic. The platform automatically recommends recent posts that have performed well for that metric and suggests parameters for such choices as budget, reach, and duration.

The user then accepts or modifies the suggestions and clicks to promote, which amplifies the reach of that post to more users.

VP of new product development Greg Gunn told me that his company’s existing Twitter tool for enterprise users has more choices, options, and control, and requires a more sophisticated user. But this stripped-down approach will be the model moving forward, he said, as Hootsuite eventually supports ads on other social networks.

Promoted Posts have become an essential way of reaching large numbers of followers and others through Facebook’s News Feed. The social network’s highly opinionated algorithm has increasingly restricted the reach of free organic posts, purportedly to avoid bombarding users with brand messages and irrelevant news.

In researching its own user base, Hootsuite found that about 75 percent “had never promoted before on Facebook,” Gunn said. The biggest reason: There are so many choices. In all, the company found the regular process required 13 separate steps.

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Because of its simplification, the company is describing its Facebook tool as “the first ad solution for human beings.”

Human beings, of course, are a fairly large market segment, which is why Gunn describes this social ad tool for users who aren’t ad specialists as “a huge opportunity.”

It’s also potentially huge because of the platform’s popularity. According to VB Insight’s recent report on social media management tools, Hootsuite “is used by more than twice as many of our respondents as any other solution.”

Competitor platforms like Sprinklr, Gunn said, do not offer such a simple set of options, while point solutions like AdStage, Kuhcoon, and Qwaya are “really great solutions for full-time ad marketers.”