Rewarding relationships

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HootSuite is hot stuff. The Vancouver-based ‘social relationship platform’ company closed a $165m funding round in August, billed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the biggest venture capital deal a Canadian software firm has ever seen.

Its backers include Accel Partners, the first institutional investor in Facebook, and Insight Venture Partners, a New York firm that previously funded the blogging platform Tumblr and also holds a sizeable stake in Twitter.

Although only four years old, HootSuite already has seven million users of its platform, which allows individuals and businesses to manage multiple social media accounts, including Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and Google+ accounts. Users can see what’s being said about them, and what’s being said to them. They can respond in real time, or schedule updates for specific times of the day. An inbuilt analytics package tracks performance.

HootSuite is clearly a firm to watch. Though it has designs on dominating the social ...