HootSuite Adds Weibo Scheduled Posts and More Social Marketing Features

The social media posting platform HootSuite ventured into China last October with support for Sina Weibo, which is a crucial avenue for social marketing to Chinese consumers. Today Canada-based HootSuite has added a bunch of new features for Weibo, the biggest of which is advanced scheduling for posts (pictured above).

In addition to scheduling, HootSuite’s Sina Weibo support now allows you – and its enterprise customers – to add multiple accounts and save searches to monitor keywords. That last one will be useful for brands wanting to track what netizens are saying about your company or products, making it easier to respond positively.

HootSuite added China’s Facebook-esque Renren back in November, and that social site gets some loving today as well. The Renren plug-in within HootSuite also adds scheduled posts and multiple accounts, along with new streams for tracking your photos and shares.

HootSuite’s community VP, Dave Olson, explained to us a few months back that much of what HootSuite is doing in China is in reaction to feedback it’s getting from local users. A possible next step for the Vancouver startup is integrating some Tencent-run social networks.

As we saw in a recent report about luxury brands engaged in social marketing to China, Sina Weibo is the go-to platform. Indeed, 88 percent of surveyed high-end overseas brands have an official Sina Weibo page.