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Hootsuite is adding geosocial to its arsenal of marketing tools with the acquisition of Geotoko, a service for running location-based marketing campaigns.
Geotoko, which made its debut last year at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, lets users manage location-based marketing campaigns across multiple platforms, including Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter and Gowalla. Users can launch giveaways, discern trends from Geotoko’s real-time analytics, and track their audience through its heatmaps feature. Geotoko also has the ability to track the checkins, comments and photos that are generated throughout any geosocial campaign.
Hootsuite will run Geotoko as a separate web app for now, but intends to integrate its geolocation features into Hootsuite itself. Geotoko co-founder Rasheed Akhtar will become Hootsuite’s new director of Local, while co-founder Adarsh Pallian will become the company’s director of Apps and Integrations.
“Geo-location will be the hotpoint addition to every savvy marketer’s mix in 2012 and beyond,” Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes said. “Geotoko is our most material acquisition to date, and we are ecstatic to welcome the talented team on board. As past TechCrunch Disrupt winners, the team will be harnessing their expertise by integrating the Geotoko engine into the HootSuite platform.”
Geotoko is Hootsuite’s fifth acquisition (after What the Trend, Twapper Keeper, TwitterBar and Swift App). The company has more than 2 million users and recently integrated with LinkedIn Company Pages and Groups.