As we reported yesterday, social media dashboard company HootSuite had raised a new round of funding, according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the funding with the company, and today, the startup is announcing a $3 million raise from previous investors and new investor, Millennium Technology Ventures. HootSuite has previously raised $1.95 million from Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures and Geoff Entress.
HootSuite offers brands and businesses a comprehensive social media dashboard that allows teams to collaboratively schedule and monitor updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms. Via the application, HootSuite users can also track campaign results, analytics and other data.
The company is also announcing a new ‘strategic acquisition’ of social storage and reporting startup TwapperKeeper.com. TwapperKeeper helps academic organizations, conference leaders, marketing departments, customer service teams and PR companies to archive, track, monitor, and analyze Twitter data. Basically, TwapperKeeper allows users to archive tweets by hashtag, keywords, or person, and offers an API as well. The app will be integrated into HootSuite’s dashboard.
By way of history, TwapperKeeper ran into some trouble with Twitter earlier this year for violating the network’s terms of service.
This follows previous acquisitions of SwiftApp (now HootSuite for Android), and TwitterBar, which enables users to post to a variety of social networks straight from the web address bar (now HootBar).
HootSuite, which now has over 2.5 million users is a profitable, and has a $8 million run rate (estimated $10 million by end of year). The company will use the new funding to make acquisitions, for sales and marketing efforts and for hiring. The company has also added Steve Johnson (former VP of Channel Partners from Constant Contact and Blackbaud) as chief revenue office; Darren Suomi (formerly at SAP and Business Object) as VP of Sales and Greg Gunn as VP of Business Development.
Similar to social media app Seesmic, HootSuite started as a third-party Twitter app, but has found a viable business offering a more enterprise-focused dashboard for agencies, brands and others. HootSuite was also the first application in which Twitter began testing its own in-stream ad product.