Product news from Hootsuite H2 2024

2024 is officially a wrap. To make sure we begin the new year with no loose ends, we’ve gathered the most important product news from Hootsuite from the last half of 2024. Read on to make sure you’re up to speed with all the features that can make your social media life easier in 2025.

Instagram

A lot is happening with Instagram in Hootsuite, so we’ll start with some news about Instagram.

First comment

If you have Instagram Business, you can now add a first comment to your posts with direct publishing in the Create module in Hootsuite. The first comment can contain text, hashtags, and emojis and has the following options:

Add up to 30 hashtags
Max 2200 characters
Post preview in the Create module gives an impression of how your comment will look on your post
The first comment can be sent, scheduled, or saved as a draft

NOTE – It is not possible to add a first comment for personal Instagram profiles, Stories, or posts published through the mobile notification flow.

Instagram Business Collaboration

Instagram has launched an option to invite collaborators to your posts, and this is now possible through Hootsuite. You can invite up to 3 collaborators to your posts, which can help you increase reach and engagement—and who doesn’t like that?

Instagram auto boost

Increasing reach, engagement, and business results on Instagram has become more challenging with organic reach only. Boosting posts is crucial to staying competitive and achieving results. With Instagram Auto Boost, you can now easily set up automated boosting once and then focus on strategy instead of manually managing boosts.

Why is this important?

Previously, you couldn’t automatically promote organic Instagram content as you could on Facebook, making it challenging to maintain a consistent strategy.

There are two use cases for the new auto-boost:

Auto-boosting based on post type: Automatically boost post types like reels, stories, or feed posts to help you focus your budget on the most engaging content.

Adding links to boosted posts: Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links in organic posts. With Instagram Auto Boost, you can include links in boosted posts to drive traffic to your website and increase engagement.

Personal Instagram accounts are no longer available in Hootsuite

Meta has changed their Instagram API, which means that as of 4 December 2024, it was no longer possible to add personal Instagram profiles to social media management tools like Hootsuite. From this date, all personal profiles have been disconnected from Hootsuite. If you had a personal profile connected to Hootsuite and would like to have it connected to Hootsuite again, you need to convert it to an Instagram Business profile. To do this, follow the instructions here.

What else is new in my Hootsuite solution?

Generative AI Chatbot

Automations and AI are the new black, and now AI (think ChatGPT) is also ready to help in Inbox 2.0. It’s now possible to set up so-called virtual agents available 24/7 to answer your customers and users. It’s quick and easy to set up, takes less than 10 minutes, and is an available feature on those channels where you receive private messages and your website. Currently, the Chatbot works in English, Spanish, and French, and Hootsuite is working hard to expand the feature to more languages.

Inbox 2.0 design update

This is a minor update, but can be significant when you spend many hours in Hootsuite’s Inbox 2.0. The Inbox 2.0 menu and message queue have changed color from a grayish tone to a more white one. The font size has also been reduced to provide a better overview.

Save ad campaigns as drafts

Do you ever find yourself working on an ad campaign and then you get interrupted and can’t save it as a draft? Leaving you with the option to either rush through it or start over. Super annoying. But there’s a solution to that now. As the headline describes, it is now possible to save ad campaigns as drafts and return to work on them later.

There is now a ‘Save as draft’ button in the ads module. In addition, under the ads section, where you get an overview of your ads, there is a section called ‘Ads drafts.’ Here, you can find your drafts, divided by social network, with the option to edit or delete.

There is also a cross-link inside the organic drafts module to create an even better overview. This link will automatically take you to ‘Ad Drafts.’ Over time, the goal is for ‘Ad drafts’ to be located together with the organic drafts so that everything is in one place.

Internal comments on posts in Planner

One of the bigger new features we’ve been looking forward to is the possibility of better collaboration inside the Hootsuite Planner module. It’s now possible to add internal comments on posts, where you can discuss, plan, or collaborate with your team on the posts you have either as drafts, planned, already published, or for approval. You can tag each other and add emojis and images.

The comments will then appear on the right side of the screen when you click on the different posts. Here, you’ll see a section called ‘Details’ and one called ‘Internal comments.’

Users will receive a notification in Hootsuite and by email when a comment is waiting for them.

Sentiment analysis in Inbox 2.0 - Advanced Inbox

If you have Advanced Inbox, we’ve got some extra news for you. Hootsuite has now incorporated sentiment analysis into Inbox 2.0. Sentiment analysis is an AI service that makes understanding user engagement and interactions easier.

The sentiment analysis tool categorizes messages in your inbox so they appear as either positive, neutral, or negative. If a message’s sentiment is incorrectly categorized, you can change it afterward, and you can also filter by sentiment to get a faster overview.

If you have been using our guide on inbound tags in Hootsuite to categorize incoming content, you can instead use sentiment analysis in the future if you have Advanced Inbox.

Hootsuite has also added a sentiment analysis report in the Analytics module so you can learn more about your data.

Export Amplify Members list

This is a minor update that can give you a better overview. Amplify admins can now export member lists from the Admin Settings section as a CSV file, including email subscription data.

TikTok comments in Inbox 2.0

If you use TikTok and work actively with community management on this platform, there’s good news: Hootsuite’s Inbox 2.0 now supports comments on your videos on TikTok.