HootSuite has been on a buying tear lately picking up What the Trend, Twapper Keeper, TwitterBar and Swift App and now the company can add Geotoko to their list of acquisitions.

The buyout was announced on Monday and with the purchase HootSuite gains access to a location-based marketing tool that aggregates information from various check-in services including Foursquare and Facebook Places while allowing companies to gather information about those check-ins which in-turn allows them to fine tune marketing campaigns and reach out to customers with promotions and other special offers.

It’s still unclear how Geotoko will be integrated with popular social media dashboard HootSuite however the acquisition does help the company move towards better corporate engagement, long seen as a necessary part of their business model as an increasing number of corporations continue to develop engagement campaigns with their customer base while requiring better analytical reporting innovations. read more

Hootsuite on Thursday announced the integration of LinkedIn Company Pages and Groups to their social media management platform.

The previous version of Hootsuite only offered access to a users main LinkedIn profile.

Using the new Hootsuite feature LinkedIn users can send company status updates and even start group discussions directly from inside the Hootsuite product.  read more

Social desktop platform Hootsuite on Wednesday announced new Facebook functionality that is sure to please users of the program and Facebook as a whole.

New options on the platform now include the ability to post and provide monitoring for Events and Groups, improved Pages and Profiles with streamlined photo uploading, geo-tools capabilities and the ability to search all public updates from within the stream.

Using Facebook streams users can manage Profiles, Pages and Groups from the dashboard, look at photos and view news feeds, events and other features found on the system. The program even allows users to assign posts to team members so they can check out what you’ve assigned.

The search functionality in the meantime allows users to search streams based on words they selection, allowing brands to receive instant feedback about their products and services.

Hootsuite also made it more simple to add photos, allowing for direct uploading rather than forcing customers to link to an image. Hootsuite uses the enhanced compose box for this method and it works smoothly and efficiently. read more

In the early hours of Thursday, April 21 various websites including HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare were offline due to Amazon AWS server issues.

The issue involved Amazon’s cloud computing platform which was experiencing technical difficulties within several major services on the platform.

Sites that did not shut down completely were experiencing major latency issues or brief up and down periods. Also included was question and answer site Formspring.

Most issues occurred because of three Amazon platform issues; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Relational Database Service.

All sites affected appear to be working correctly at this time.

Most entrepreneurs today are aware that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others can play an essential role in marketing their businesses. It’s also become clear to many of us that using social media as a marketing tool is a time consuming process that requires much thought and planning to use it successfully. So how can you make the most of social media marketing without spending so much time at it? One efficient way is to use a social media dashboard.

What is a Social Media Dashboard?

A social media dashboard isn’t another social network for you to deal with. Rather, it’s an organizational tool to help you manage all those other networks. Instead of having to go to each site to post your messages or to see what customers and competition are saying, it’s all brought together in one place. It lets you sort through all the media clutter, pinpoints exactly what you are looking for, and delivers it to you. It’s an efficient way to accomplish brand management. read more

HootSuite has finally taken their social media dashboard to the Apple iPad.

With HootSuite iPad users gain access to multiple Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare accounts monitoring, message scheduling for those times you want your messages to go out at a certain time, Twitter search capabilities, click statistics for your social networking messages and geo-location based services.

HootSuite users with existing accounts can sync their accounts to the iPad, allowing for seemless integration among various devices.

According to Mashable, the HuiteSuite application for iPad is free to download from Apple, however limitations on use are now imposed by the company’s newly minted freemium business model.

Here’s a closer look at the new HootSuite iPad Application: read more

After briefly disappearing from the iPhone app store, HootSuite has re-emerged with a meaner, leaner iPhone app that may help them survive tweetageddon when Twitter relaunches Tweetie as their official app.

No matter where you’re headed, this Owl will help you stay in touch and informed with instant translation to 50+ languages, geo-location to pinpoint yourself on the globe, and Facebook Profiles and Pages added to the mix — plus a few surprises in the suitcase. (Official HootSuite Blog)

While I’m personally not too crazy about the geo-location feature (as I believe it’s an asset for muggers), the Facebook integration is one of the best that I have seen for a multi-social app, as it allows you to not only view your news feed, but also like items upon your friends status updates. read more

In December of 2009 HootSuite launched a premium iPhone app upon Steve Jobs backyard that gave iPhone lovers the ability to schedule tweets from their iDevice (instead of their computer). Later on HootSuite launched a free lite version as well as an Android app, and the rest is now history.

Fastforward towards today and it seems as if the premium version of HootSuite is currently unavailable (note: iTunes link) in the app store (at least in the US).

It is unclear why HootSuite decided to pull the premium version, although this could be in response to Twitter’s buyout of Tweetie which has already forced one twitter app into retirement (and may force others into extinction as well).

HootSuite still links to their premium app on their product page, although there is no news or information why their premium app is currently missing upon the app store.

Update (4/30): The premium HootSuite app is back! Although there still is no explanation as to why it disappeared in the first place.

I am still awaiting for a comment as why the app vanished from the app store.