HootSuite snaps up SF-based competitor Seesmic

The acquisition comes just months after Seesmic axed half its workforce

Social media management company HootSuite has snapped up a very worthy competitor this morning.  The Vancouver-based company announced early Thursday morning that it has acquired fellow social media management system Seesmic in a deal aimed at broadening HootSuite’s SMB and large enterprise reach.

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Seesmic has raised $16 million to date from investors as diverse as Ron Conway and Jeff Clavier to Softbank Capital and Salesforce.com.  Originally founded in 2007 as a video sharing service, Seesmic switched its focus multiple times before settling on social media management.  Its most recent aim has been to target SMBs and large enterprises by letting them manage their entire social media presence from one dashboard. 

HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes says that for the time being, users will still be able to access both products, and over time they'll be merged into one platform.

No word on whether Seesmic’s team will be transferred over to HootSuite, or what role Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur will be playing from this point forward (if he will remain involved at all).  We’ve reached out to HootSuite for more information and will update asap.

HootSuite boasts a membership of some five million global clients who send over 1.5 million messages daily.  Some of the company’s more high profile clients include 79 of the Fortune 100 companies, including McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Virgin, Fox, Sony Music, and more.

In a vague statement that offers zero details on the terms of the deal, Holmes had this to say:

“I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmic’s CEO, Loïc Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business.  We are thrilled to welcome Seesmic’s users into the HootSuite family.”

So it sounds like Seesmic will cease to exist from this point on. 

Earlier this year, Seesmic axed more than half of its team, cutting 18 employees and leaving itself only 15.  The company has had a rough go of things over the last several years, with several jumps from social media posting to becoming a Twitter client, and then a customer service management system, and then finally returning to social media cross posting.  Earlier this year, Seesmic announced that it was going to expand on the tools from its Ping.fm acquisition to begin offering users a paid service called Seesmic Ping.

Some Seesmic history:

At first, Seesmic was a video Twitter service with aspirations to be a "worldwide talkshow in video," intregrating a video comments feature into its platform.

In April 2008, Seesmic acquired Twhirl, a desktop Twitter client and in 2009, Seesmic launched Seesmic Desktop, a rival to TweetDeck, in which Twitter users could view multiple accounts in a single window.

In January 2010, the company acquired Ping.fm, a service that allows users to publish content on more than 50 different social networks with one click.

In February 2011, Seesmic integrated the Seesmic desktop with Salesforce Chatter. The collaboration was touted as the industry’s first social/enterprise collaboration and will allow Salesforce users to follow people, business processes, documents, and application data as they would a friend or group on Facebook or Twitter. 

In August of that year, Seesmic announced it was moving into the customer relations management business, splitting into two product suites: Seesmic Social and Seesmic CRM. It also announced that it was releasing Android and iOS CRM apps that interfaced with Salesforce.

Founded in 2008, HootSuite has raised $21.9 million in funding from Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures, and Geoff Entress, among others.  This makes HootSuite’s sixth acquisition in the last two years.  Other acquisitions include Swift App in 2010, as well as TwitterBar, TwapperKeeper, What the Trend, and Geotoko in 2011.

We’ll keep you posted as we get more information on the acquisition.