Hootsuite created the social media management category 14 years ago, and has been helping its customers navigate the fast evolving space ever since. Social media has become a mirror – if not an engine – of culture, and in July 2022, we saw an opportunity to evolve our brand to reflect just that. Having acted as advisors and mentors to our customers since day one, we see ourselves as social marketers’ guide to the wild.
As part of our brand relaunch, we revisited our approach on social and defined a new purpose: we believe in the power of social to uplift people. We see LinkedIn as a platform where not only professional, but personal networks thrive — and the main place social marketers frequent for daily insights and inspiration. As part of our wider social strategy, we saw it as a powerful and strategic channel to establish a new and engaging brand voice that would uplift social marketers and help our customers harness the power of social. It is where we have taken strategic steps to establish our cheeky and relatable brand voice, foster community, drive audience engagement and show rather than tell our followers just how creative they can get on social.
We know that our audience on LinkedIn looks to us as experts on social. This was the fuel behind the flame of our rebranded social strategy for LinkedIn. We took a unique approach and leveraged first-hand insights, experience, and expertise from our social marketing team and our product to be our audience’s guide to the wild world of social.
To do this, we focused our strategy on uplifting our community — where we build trust by empowering our users with topical updates and educational content to keep them on top of industry trends. At the same time, to keep it light for our overwhelmed social marketers, aiming to bring joy through Owly (our lovable, recently rebranded mascot) and humorously leaning into the pain points and truths that come with the job of a social media manager. A key part of our strategy is to help our audience feel heard and seen, and we develop content that provides that, while also positioning Hootsuite as their advocate and cheerleader.
And with that, our new, unique brand voice was born. To bring our new identity to life on LinkedIn, our social team adopted an authoritative brand voice persona of the ‘Mischievous Mentor’ – with Owly at the center of all content.
Picture the best teacher you’ve ever had. They’ve been around the block, know things you don’t, remind you to take care of yourself out there and poke fun at universal human truths. That’s Hootsuite (and Owly) on LinkedIn — we reveal the future of social, we level up our audiences with love, and we inject some much-needed mischief along the way.
We took a ‘test and learn’ approach to identify which content pillars and tactics resonated best with our audience. We tackle a new topic that social marketers struggle with on LinkedIn every day. We break down the key pain points that our audience experiences and provide them with clarity and actionable tips on how they can integrate it into their social practices and strategy. We dissect complex topics and documents (i.e. LinkedIn PDFs) into digestible learning opportunities, share linkless posts to spark engagement with our community, and highlight blog posts and short-form video to keep our audience informed on topical updates. The ultimate goal of our LinkedIn strategy is to acknowledge our followers (social marketers) to - first and foremost - make them feel seen. We also aim to show and inspire them to use our LinkedIn channel as a case study for their own strategies and be a shining example of the true power of social.
Separately, in addition to executing our owned content strategy on LinkedIn, we leverage our employee advocacy tool, Amplify, to boost engagement and further drive channel growth. By creating content for employees to push out via their personal social channels, we are able to extend the reach of our new brand identity and purpose, while building a larger community through our own employees’ networks.
Brand Relaunch and Ongoing Community Building
Since launching our rebranded strategy on LinkedIn, we’ve seen a substantial spike in our key metrics. Our posts consistently see record numbers when it comes to reach, engagements, shares, and link clicks — testament that our new brand voice is resonating with our audience and driving added value.
In the first 5 months of this new strategy, we’ve garnered nearly 4.5M impressions, 75k+ engagements, and nearly 300k link clicks across our LinkedIn content. We’ve seen a 15% increase in our total followers compared to the same period last year. This year alone, we published nearly 930 posts and attracted 9.2M impressions, positioning LinkedIn as one our highest growing social channels with over 400k followers.
More notably, our LinkedIn channel has substantially more followers than any competitor in our industry and 70% more engagements on our content.
Employee Advocacy
In November 2022, Hootsuite’s employee advocacy program was awarded first place by DSMN8 as Canada’s most active marketing and social advertising professionals on social, thanks to our employee advocacy strategy leveraging Amplify by Hootsuite. Our employees shared over 29k pieces of content on LinkedIn in 2022, driving 100k link clicks, and nearly 70k engagements. The content we made readily available to our employees to share around our rebrand in July was shared 637 times and reached over 920k people on social. We also saw a 250% year-over-year increase in sourced revenue and 4.1M employer brand impressions in Q1 attributed to employee posts via Amplify.
