Every few months, a social media tool drops an update that actually makes your workday a little less miserable. Hootsuite’s May releases fall into that category. There is nothing revolutionary here, but there are several genuinely useful improvements that address real pain points for social managers, analysts, and advocacy teams.
TikTokFinally Gets Real Listening Tools
For years, TikTok has been that platform everyone knew they needed to monitor but couldn’t really track properly without cobbling together scattered manual searches and third-party workarounds. Hootsuite’s new TikTok hashtag monitoring changes that. You can now track up to 50 brand-relevant hashtags per business token, with posts ingested directly into your Insights channels and Topics. Engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares come along for the ride.
The backfill feature is particularly smart. Instead of starting from zero when you set up a new listening stream, Hootsuite pulls in up to 1,000 of the top-performing posts from the previous 90 days. That means you’re not flying blind while you wait for new content to roll in.
This is a big deal for brands trying to understand the TikTok conversation around them, especially given that the platform has become a search engine in its own right for younger audiences. Technology continues to reshape how people discover content, and TikTok is at the center of that shift.
OwlyGPT Starts Acting Like a Conversation, Not a Search Bar
TheOwlyGPT streaming update is the kind of change that feels obvious once you see it but somehow none of the AI assistants did it before. Instead of waiting for a complete response to appear after you’ve prompted the tool, answers now stream in real time. You watch insights build as the AI works through your prompt.
This matters more than it might seem. When you’re asking complex questions about trend analysis or campaign planning, seeing the AI “think” creates a much more natural interaction. It feels less like submitting a query to a search engine and more like working through an idea with a colleague. For content creators and strategists who rely on AI to help them think through open-ended problems, this is a meaningful usability improvement.
LinkedIn Reposts Get Personal
Here’s one for the employee advocacy crowd. Hootsuite’s Amplify app now lets advocates add their own notes and commentary when resharing LinkedIn posts, rather than just hitting share as-is.
This seems small, but it addresses one of the biggest problems with corporate advocacy programs: content that sounds exactly like it came from a corporate broadcast. When an employee adds their own voice, their own context, their own perspective, the post performs dramatically better. LinkedIn’s algorithm has made this pretty clear over the years. Authentic engagement wins. This update makes it easier to be authentic without extra friction.
Automation That Doesn’t Annoy People
Hootsuite also tightened up its Inbox automation in two ways that should reduce some everyday frustrations. Auto-responders are now restricted to direct messages only, which means they no longer fire on story mentions, story replies, or shared reels. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of an obviously automatedreply to a story, you know why this matters.
The second change gives teams finer control over which message types a custom Virtual Agent handles. You can now decide exactly when automation takes over and when a human should step in. This is exactly what social care teams have been asking for. Automation is great when it works, but poorly configured auto-responses can damage customer relationships quickly.
Accessibility Gets Baked In, Not Bolted On
Threads alt text support is now available directly from Hootsuite’s publishing workflow. No more remembering to add descriptions after you’ve already scheduled your post. This keeps accessibility as part of the standard process rather than an afterthought, which is how it should be.
The New Leaderboard Actually Shows What’s Working
The Amplify leaderboard redesign around a points-based system deserves mention, especially for teams running advocacy programs. Admins can now see total points per advocate, drill into individual scoring events, and filter by social network, team, or user metadata. You can add the leaderboard tile to any Analytics report and export it for leadership.
Previously, leaderboards often felt like hollow gamification. Now there’s actual data backing up what drives advocate performance. For teams that need to prove ROI on their advocacy programs to stakeholders, this is genuinely useful.
These updates don’t rewrite the rules of social media management, but they do make several existing workflows considerably less painful. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
