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PRESS RELEASES

HootSuite Acquires TwitterBar Adding 1.9 million Users

HootSuite – makers of a market-leading social media dashboard – announce the acquisition of TwitterBar, an add-on for the Firefox browser. Now called HootBar, this tool allows users to post Twitter updates directly from the browser address bar in both web and mobile versions.

April 6, 2011 VANCOUVER, CANADA HootSuite has acquired an add-on for the Firefox 4 browser called TwitterBar – now renamed HootBar – which allows users to post to social profiles directly from the web address bar.

This acquisition is significant for the makers of the popular social media dashboard. In two years, HootSuite has grown from a fledgling start-up to an industry-leader with over 1.5 million users around the world. Further, just four months after launching paid plans, the company is now cashflow positive and has grown to a team of 48 people.HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes explains:

Since launching our Freemium business model last November, we’ve reached a cashflow positive milestone. This revenue enables us to continue to improve and expand with acquisitions like TwitterBar in order to provide enhanced tools for our power and SME userbase. We look forward to building a relationship with the Firefox community and developers with this easy way of publishing to social media channels.”

HootBar Details

TwitterBar is software licensed under the GPL v2. Initially created by Tony Farndon and developed by Christopher Finke, TwitterBar has over 1.9 million installations by Firefox users.

With the transition from TwitterBar to HootBar, users will enjoy more options for spreading messages across multiple networks. Plus, users can quick-launch the popular “Hootlet” for even more functionality including pre-populating a message with the shortened URL of the current page.

The beauty of the app is in its simplicity for quickly spreading messages. Just type a message and append it with one of the HootBar commands to post directly to Twitter; open the message in the Hootlet; post from multiple accounts; or choose even more posting options.

The HootBar is available for immediate download as an add-on for Firefox 4 for web and Android mobile platforms.

Frequent Releases

This acquisition shows HootSuite’s commitment to providing new and compelling offerings to a rapidly-growing SME business audience. Along with recent accolades from Mashable, HootSuite was named among the top 5 most influential brands at SXSW 2011 and continues to be the social media tool of choice for top enterprise brands, government agencies as well as small and medium businesses.

This announcement follows a stream of ground-breaking releases by HootSuite including:

HootSuite is available in Basic (free), Pro and Enterprise packages on web as well as mobile versions for iOS4 (iPhone/iPad/iPod), Android, BlackBerry and “keitai” (Japanese feature phone).

Contact

For more information about HootSuite, and to arrange an interview with CEO Ryan Holmes, visit the media kit: http://blog.hootsuite.com/media and for more about this release, visit:http://blog.hootsuite.com/HootBar.

Contact

Hootsuite Media Team
media@hootsuite.com