AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Hootsuite on AWS Accelerates Social Media Management for Businesses and Brands
By Chavi Gupta, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Kowsalya Jaganathan, Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Hootsuite |
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Social media has become an integral part of our everyday lives, as billions of people around the world use social media to share information, connect with their friends, family, and favorite businesses and brands, or to find entertainment.
With the increasing popularity of social media, it has become essential for businesses and brands to have their presence on many different social media channels and enable customers to connect with them on their platform of choice. As a result, businesses now perceive untapped customer segments and emerging markets as economically viable due to the availability of digital content, social media, ecommerce, and self-service digital assistants.
More than ever, businesses need an effective and economical platform to manage their digital presence and provide the best social care experience.
In this post, we will learn how Hootsuite’s social media platform leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a secure, scalable, and resilient platform that enables customers to scale their business using social. Hootsuite gives brands a way to reach and communicate with customers on different social platforms and measure the return of investment (ROI) of their marketing campaigns.
Hootsuite is an AWS Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that is one of the leading providers of digital customer experience products for marketing automation, content automation, and customer 360 use cases.
Social Media Management Challenges for Businesses
For most businesses, creating a digital footprint for their brand on social media is a challenging task. It’s a full-time job that requires skill and expertise to effectively project the brand’s image on social.
Businesses face a number of challenges in managing their social presence, including:
- Growing number of social media platforms: With the growing number of social media channels, customers get a choice to communicate with businesses in their preferred channel. Thus, it becomes essential for businesses to have their presence on popular channels. Each platform has its own interface, algorithms, and best practices, however, and managing multiple accounts across different platforms can be overwhelming.
- Time and resource constraints: Managing social media requires an investment of time and resources. Managing multiple social media channels, creating engaging content, responding to posts and comments, and analyzing the performance of your content is a time-consuming task. Businesses need to have social media marketing specialists or outsource social media management to ensure a consistent and effective presence.
- Brand management: Social media provides customers a platform to voice their opinions and provide feedback publicly. Negative experiences, complaints, or poor customer care can quickly impact a company’s reputation. Monitoring and managing online reputation, handling crises, and swiftly addressing customer issues are crucial aspects of social media management.
- Measuring ROI: Measuring the ROI of social media efforts can be challenging. Determining which metrics to track, analyzing data, and attributing social media activities to business goals is often complex.
- Evolving trends: Social media trends evolve rapidly. New features, formats, and strategies emerge regularly, and businesses need to adapt to stay relevant. This requires upskilling, experimentation, and keeping up with industry updates to effectively utilize social media platforms.
Solution Overview
Hootsuite provides a robust social media management platform for you to conveniently manage multiple social media profiles. The platform enables users to post content to multiple social media profiles at the same time and view analytics data for their profiles in a single dashboard.
Figure 1 – Hootsuite dashboard.
Hootsuite embraced microservices architecture as part of its modernization journey and moved away from monolith and service-oriented architectures. Currently, over 120 microservices support the core dashboard product, 90% of which run on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The rest of the services are on Amazon Elastic Containers Service (Amazon ECS).
Adopting microservices architecture deployed on Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS helped Hootsuite reduce operational overhead and enabled it to build services with clearly-defined domains and boundaries.
As thousands of businesses around the world rely on Hootsuite for its crucial business operations, any outage or degradation of service in the Hootsuite dashboard could have a serious business impact for customers. To meet the availability requirements of their customers, Hootsuite implemented a multi-cluster strategy across multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs), which ensures high availability of the Hootsuite dashboard.
Hootsuite continues to invest time and effort in optimizing its infrastructure to provide a more scalable, secure, and resilient platform. Recently, Hootsuite adopted Karpenter to efficiently manage the auto scaling of its Kubernetes clusters; Karpenter is an open-source, high-performance, flexible, Kubernetes cluster auto-scaler built with AWS.
Figure 2 – Hootsuite architecture on AWS.
The Hootsuite social media platform is accessible on web and mobile clients. The user interface (UI) components of the application are served using Amazon CloudFront from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Low latency is achieved by leveraging CloudFront to securely deliver content to the frontend, and dynamic requests are served by microservices deployed in EKS or ECS.
Security is of paramount importance to Hootsuite. All HTTP traffic is filtered and monitored through AWS WAF and the application is continuously monitored for vulnerabilities using Amazon Inspector. Hootsuite monitors and improves the security posture of the workload by leveraging AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub.
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics
Hootsuite is a data-driven organization with more than 50 inbound and outbound data pipelines. Hootsuite Advanced Analytics provides reports and dashboards that help customers stay ahead of the competition and measure and prove the ROI of investments in social.
It provides a clear overview of the social media marketing funnel and helps teams understand the impact of social media campaigns on the bottom line, which can help organizations further optimize spending.
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics also offers the capability to customize analytics and set up sophisticated reports based on business needs. You can customize analytics by setting up custom metrics and ROI metric profiles.
Figure 3 – Hootsuite Impact dashboard.
Events are streamed in real-time from microservices using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and ingested into Amazon Redshift, which is the core of Hootsuite’s data analytics solution.
A highly standardized, opinionated, and templated data platform is built using AWS Glue to reduce the operational overhead and the time taken to build a new integration. Data can be exported and leveraged in Amazon QuickSight and other third-party business intelligence (BI) tools to present data insights in an easy-to-understand and configurable dashboard.
Social Care with Hootsuite Inbox
Hootsuite’s Inbox is an advanced messaging tool that helps customers manage messaging and communication from multiple social accounts like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X within one unified inbox. It also allows customers to connect customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which helps to identify and resolve customer issues quickly with contact data. It allows integration with customer service solutions like Zendesk for ticketing.
Agents have the ability to set their availability and personal preferences, view and filter their inbox queue, lock conversations to provide a consistent support experience, and track real-time metrics to keep track of their own performance.
Figure 4 – Hootsuite Inbox agent view.
Admins have the ability to configure agent workspaces, set up virtual agents, set up auto-responder scripts, create and send customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, route conversations to agents based on skill set, and monitor the performance of your agents, teams, channels, and topics in real-time.
Figure 5 – Hootsuite Inbox admin view.
Conclusion
In this post, we learned how the Hootsuite media platform is leveraging Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS to provide a scalable and secure social media management platform for businesses.
We also looked at how Hootsuite is providing a digital customer experience platform by leveraging AWS services like Amazon Redshift and Amazon QuickSight to provide out-of-the-box capabilities to businesses to measure the impact of their paid and organic content.
Hootsuite’s social media management platform is available on AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors (ISVs), that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software on AWS.
The availability of Hootsuite on AWS Marketplace enables more businesses to build and execute their social media strategy across different social channels from a single dashboard.
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Hootsuite – AWS Partner Spotlight
Hootsuite is an AWS Partner that is one of the leading providers of digital customer experience products for marketing automation, content automation, and customer 360 use cases.