In an effort to reduce the number of spam messages in direct messages (DMs), Twitter introduced a new setting where you can only receive DMs from Twitter verified users that you follow. Messages from verified users who you don't follow will be sent to the message request inbox on Twitter. Users who previously set their account to receive messages from everyone will be automatically migrated to the new ‘Allow Messages only from Verified Users’ setting. Further information on the change can be found on Twitter's help website.

With this change, Twitter DMs may not reach connected Twitter accounts in Hootsuite Inbox (Inbox or Inbox 2.0), and you may see a decrease in your inbound direct messages. We encourage you to review your Privacy and Security settings on Twitter, and assess if the changes are problematic to your Twitter engagement. If you want to revert the changes, use the following instructions:

1. Go to your settings on Twitter.
2. From your Twitter Settings, select Privacy and Safety, and then select Direct Messages.
3. Select Allow message requests from everyone.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) aims to create a safer digital space where users' fundamental rights are protected and to establish a level playing field for businesses. The DSA is targeted at online service providers - the obligations are wide ranging and differ according to how an organization is categorized under the Act.

Starting July 10, 2023, if your Facebook or Instagram ads target any European Union countries or its associated territories (including in situations where EU countries/territories are indirectly targeted by selecting “worldwide” as your target), you will be required to enter the person or organization benefiting from the ad ("beneficiary"). You'll also have to document who is the person or organization paying for the ad ("payer") if that person or organization is different from the "beneficiary." A list of the EU countries and associated territories is available in the Meta article: Beneficiary and payer requirements for ads targeting the European Union.

This information will be required for all new, duplicated, or edited ads targeting the European Union or its associated territories. Your ad will not be published on any Meta platforms if you do not enter the information. If you are running an existing campaign that does not include the required information, and it is scheduled to run past July 10, 2023, your ads will stop running on the Meta platform. This requirement applies to all ad creation surfaces, including the Marketing API.

We're saying goodbye to Impact - and hello to Hootsuite Advanced Analytics. Proving the business value of your social media campaigns and activity is about to get a lot easier. With Advanced Analytics, you won't have to switch between Hootsuite and the Impact app - you'll find all the data, analytics, and reporting you need right in Hootsuite.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Better experience - No more switching between apps. Manage all your ROI measurement and reporting, including adding and managing social accounts and team members, in a single place.
• Better metrics - Add multiple metrics to a single chart? Oh yeah. Create custom metrics across multiple social networks for a holistic view? You got it. See Page- and post-level metrics for all your Pinterest posts, including video metrics? Check.
• Better data - Connect your Google Analytics 4 account to Impact to analyze and report on your social and web performance in one view.

We are saying goodbye to the Hootsuite Free plan. If you're a Free plan customer, you'll need to upgrade to a Professional plan to continue using Hootsuite. We'll begin restricting Free accounts that haven't upgraded on March 31, 2023.

With the Free plan, you were limited to only being able to manage two social accounts and schedule up to five posts. If you choose to switch to the Professional plan, you can manage up to ten social accounts and schedule an unlimited number of posts! Take a look at our plan offerings.

How we can help you with this transition

You are important to us and we'd love for you to stay with us as we grow. Here are some of the options we can help you with:

Change your plan

Keep your social running smoothly (and do a LOT more) with one of our paid plans! Learn more about our plan offerings. To change your plan, do the following:

1. Go to Account, and then select Plan and billing.
2. On the Plan and features tab, expand Manage my subscription, and then select Upgrade my plan.

Permanently delete your Hootsuite account

If you leave us now, you’ll take away the biggest part of us. We have great plans for Hootsuite and would love for you to stay and grow with us. If you want to permanently delete your account, you can do so. Know that if you delete your account, you will lose access to Hootsuite, your scheduled content will be permanently deleted, and the email associated with that account cannot be used for a future Hootsuite account.

Deleting your account takes effect immediately and accounts are not recoverable.

In December 2022, we removed Assignments from all Hootsuite accounts. Assignments served our customers well throughout the years, but based on customer feedback, we decided that it was past its prime. Assignments is not available for Hootsuite accounts created after July 7, 2022.

You have an excellent alternative for delegating posts and messages and collaborating with colleagues.

Use Hootsuite Inbox

While Assignments only supports Facebook and Twitter, Inbox lets you assign messages from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, making it even easier to delegate tasks and work efficiently. You can also see threaded conversations, which gives you a more complete view than Assignments.

We know that many of our customers like using Assignments to assign messages to themselves from Streams. To meet this need, we built the Saved items feature. Saved items works like a set of bookmarks. It’s a place where you can store (or “assign”) messages now, and return to them later to view or interact with them. Learn how to save an item for later.

To use Inbox for team assignments, we recommend that you start setting up assignment rules in Inbox well before December 2022. Read Automate assignments and tags to learn how to assign incoming conversation threads to specific teams or team members in Inbox. You can also manually assign individual conversations.

On March 15, 2021, we retired two of our legacy extension products: Hootfeed and Hootlet. If you have Hootlet installed in your Chrome browser, we recommend removing it.

We’re saying goodbye to Hootfeed, but we know that many customers found value in Hootlet. So we will be building a better, more robust Hootlet experience in the future. For now, the Hootsuite app directory offers these partner integrations that can help you store and share web content:

• Pocket - Save content from anywhere on the web to your Pocket account. Then with the Pocket app for Hootsuite, share that saved content to your social accounts. This app is available to all Hootsuite plan types, and it’s included free with Hootsuite Enterprise. Learn more about the Pocket app.

• Curate by Upcontent - Discover and curate the best content in your UpContent account. Then integrate your account as a Hootsuite content source to share relevant topics on your social channels. This app is available to all Hootsuite plan types. Learn more about the Curate by Upcontent app.

• RSS AutoPublisher - Auto-publish from RSS feeds to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Automate up to 25 feeds and make your social accounts the new go-tos for the latest news. This app is available to all Hootsuite plan types, and it’s included free with Hootsuite Enterprise. Learn more about the RSS AutoPublisher app.

As an alternate solution to Hootfeed, you could try the following for displaying live Twitter streams at events:

• Hootsuite streams - Create search streams for monitoring certain keywords on your connected Twitter profile. See Create a Twitter search or keyword stream.

• TINT Events - TINT Events allows brands to collect, personalize, display, and monitor social media content feeds on any screen from TV displays to stadium jumbotrons. TINT is a Hootsuite technology partner. Learn more at www.tintup.com/events or contact Hootsuite for a demo.

To help you streamline all of your paid content promotion activities, we've created a new Ads area in Hootsuite where you can manage all of your boosted posts in one place. From now on, you can go to the Advertise area to boost your high-performing Facebook and LinkedIn posts.

With this change, we're removing the Promote tab from Plan. You can still do everything in Ads that you're used to doing in Promote. You can find a post to boost (or for Facebook, set up an automated boost), pause or delete a scheduled boost for a post, and view metrics on how your boosted post is performing.

Simply select Ads on the Hootsuite navigation, select the social channel where you want to promote your post, and set up your Facebook Boost or LinkedIn Boost as before.

For detailed instructions on how to boost an organic post on Facebook and LinkedIn, see Boost a Facebook post or Boost a LinkedIn Page post.

Facebook Analytics will no longer be available after June 30, 2021. Read the Facebook announcement.

This change will not affect Hootsuite Analytics or Impact. You can continue to track and analyze the performance of your Facebook posts alongside your other social networks in both Hootsuite Analytics and Impact in Analytics.

LinkedIn posts that include videos now appear in your streams and in Inbox messages. In both Streams and Inbox, you can play attached videos, like video posts, and view and respond to comments.

In short, LinkedIn posts with videos now include all the same engagement functionality as other video posts in Hootsuite.

For more about using videos with LinkedIn, see Everything You Need to Know About LinkedIn Video.

You can now also analyze your LinkedIn video posts in Analytics. LinkedIn video metrics are available in both Reports and the Post performance view. To learn more, see Metrics in Analytics.

With the release of iOS 14, Apple announced a change to how apps collect data on devices using iOS 14. Apple’s AppTransparencyTracking framework requires all apps to ask iOS 14 users whether they agree to being tracked across apps and websites owned by other companies. If a user opts out, Apple will prevent certain data collection and sharing from the device.

This has significant implications for how the Facebook pixel tracks app and web conversion events, and big impacts to our Hootsuite Ads customers who advertise on mobile devices and across the web.

In response to this change, Facebook will process pixel conversion events from iOS devices using Aggregated Event Measurement. To continue measuring web events from iOS 14 devices, you’ll need to make several changes. There are also several new limitations to be aware of.

Who is affected?

Anyone who runs Facebook advertising campaigns for leads or sales will be affected by this change. Targeting, reporting, and optimization will be reduced as a large number of iOS users opt out of the required prompt.

If your Facebook advertising activities don’t focus on conversions, but rather on social brand awareness metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and video views, the impact of these changes will be minimal.

Actions to take now

If you plan to deliver ads for conversion events that occur on your business’s app or website, see Facebook’s help article How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads for the lists of actions to take and new limitations in advertising on Facebook.

Changes to Hootsuite Ads

As a result of the changes that Facebook will be making, here are the changes you will see in Hootsuite Ads:

• Attribution window settings: The options for all campaigns will be 7-day (default) or 1-day click attribution windows.
• Ad creative: You won’t be able to use deferred deep links in ads in an App install or App event campaign targeting iOS 14.
• Targeting:
• • Mobile app custom audiences and app connections will no longer be available as targeting options.
  • App install, app event, or value optimization ad sets will not be able to target iOS 14+ devices.
• Minimum duration: Campaigns with “Lowest cost with bid cap” or “Cost cap campaigns” bidding strategies must have a duration of at least 3 days.

We can help!

We’re here to help you understand the impacts to your ads and reporting, and to make the necessary changes to adapt.

All Hootsuite Ads customers have an allotment of free strategic review sessions per year. These are 1-hour, live discussions with a social ads expert. Schedule a session from your Hootsuite Ads dashboard on the Services tab.

Instagram and Facebook are making some changes that affect publishing to those networks in Hootsuite:

• As of November 3, 2020, the option to tag Instagram and Facebook posts with a location is no longer available.

Between January and March of 2021, the following two Instagram changes will occur:

• Each Instagram account will be limited to publishing a maximum of 25 Instagram posts with direct publishing from Hootsuite (or any other third-party publisher) within a rolling 24-hour period. To publish more than 25 posts within a 24-hour period, you can go to Instagram directly to publish more.
  Stories and posts published using the mobile notification workflow won't be included in this limit.
  
• Instagram accounts linked to Facebook Pages with large audiences may be asked to confirm their identity and secure their account before they can resume publishing via Hootsuite. This process involves 1) enabling two-factor authentication to protect the account from unauthorized access and 2) confirming your primary location by turning on your mobile device's location services.

Instagram is making these changes to maintain the safety and integrity of the Instagram community. If you’d like to provide feedback directly to the Instagram team, you may do so via this survey.

As Facebook continues to enhance the security of its platform, it is enforcing policies that control how third-party partners, like Hootsuite, access and use Facebook data. As a result, third-party access to public information available for Facebook Pages is restricted, and the following Hootsuite functionality has changed:

• You can no longer add Page Search streams to monitor Facebook Pages that you don’t own. Hootsuite is removing this option as an available stream type. Any existing Page Search streams you’ve added will no longer work. You can delete them by selecting More options in the top right of the stream and selecting Delete Stream.
  
• If you manage more than one Facebook Page in Hootsuite, you can no longer interact with a Page stream as another Page. This includes commenting and replying as another Page in Timeline, Unpublished, Mentions, My Posts, and Activity streams, as well as in Assignments Manager.
  
• In Mentions streams, you can no longer view, like, or reply to comments. You can add new comments to a mention, but they will not display in the stream when the webpage is refreshed. Likes, comment counts, attachments, images, and videos in mentions or in comments on mentions will no longer display in the Mentions stream.
  
• In Inbox, the Page name is no longer displayed for messages sent by Facebook Pages. Messages sent by Facebook Pages appear in Inbox as Visitor Posts, made by "Facebook User."

For more details about Facebook's public Page policies, see Simplifying Our Platform Terms and Developer Policies on the Facebook for Developers blog.

In an ongoing effort to improve security and privacy across the web, Google Chrome is changing the way applications use cookies for 3rd-party integrations. These changes are being rolled out the week of February 17, 2020.

At Hootsuite, these changes apply to our partner integrations in Hootsuite Apps. Those apps and integrations that have already been updated to follow Chrome’s new cookie policy will continue working as before this change and Hootsuite users will see no impact.

Apps that have not been updated yet will be impacted in various ways, the most common being that logging in will not work in Google Chrome. Other apps may display various errors in stream instead of the expected stream content. We have proactively reached out to our 3rd-party developers to update their apps accordingly.

Impacts to the following apps to be confirmed, they will not work as expected in Google Chrome until they have been updated. The interim workaround is to use a different browser with these apps if you experience any issues:

• Trustpilot Reviews
• Glassdoor Company Updates
• Digimind
• PromoRepublic
• Radarly
• WebDAM
• Newslit
• ShareRoot
• ZeroFox

On March 31, 2020, Instagram will complete the deprecation of its Legacy API (application programming interface), which supports Instagram Personal profiles in Hootsuite. Personal profiles will be migrated onto the replacement Basic Display API. This new API does not provide the same level of functionality for Personal profiles, and requires a reconnection.

Instagram Business profiles connected to a Facebook Page have full Instagram functionality within Hootsuite. This includes Instagram analytics, the ability to publish directly, and being able to engage within your streams.

• If your Business profile is already connected to Hootsuite and authenticated with Facebook, you are not impacted by this change.
• If you have a Personal Instagram profile, consider converting it to a Business profile. If you choose to stay with a Personal profile, the API migration will require you to reconnect on or after March 23, 2020. After this date, any posts scheduled to publish will fail to send notifications until the profile is reconnected. See the following full list of reduced functionality for Personal profiles in Hootsuite’s products. Personal profiles using the Hootsuite mobile app for iOS should also update to the latest version of the app.
• If you have a Business profile connected to Hootsuite, but it’s not authenticated with Facebook, you will need to reconnect on or after March 23, 2020. If you don't authenticate with Facebook, your profile will be subject to the same limitations as Personal profiles. Learn more: Connect an Instagram account to a Facebook Page
  
  Reconnect your Instagram Business account and complete the Facebook authentication step to avoid loss of Instagram functionality (see Connect an Instagram account).

Personal profile support after March 23, 2020

• Instagram avatars and usernames will no longer be available. Wherever you select, view, and manage your profile within the dashboard, it will be identifiable only by its Instagram handle.
• Hootsuite Analytics will no longer be available for Personal Instagram profiles.
• The My Posts stream will no longer show post locations, comments, or like and comment counts. To view engagement on Personal profile posts, you will have to open them in Instagram from the stream.
• Inbound tagging will no longer be supported for Personal Instagram posts.
• Hootsuite Impact - Personal Instagram profiles will no longer be supported in Impact.

Instagram offers two different APIs for partner use. The legacy Instagram API, and the newer Instagram Graph API, which is actively developed and maintained.

Before January 1, 2020, Hootsuite Analytics retrieved data for both Business and Personal profiles from the legacy API. We’ve since updated the data source for Instagram Business profiles that are authenticated with Facebook. Now we’re pulling data for those Business profiles from the Graph API.

Because the Graph API does not support Personal profiles, Personal profile analytics, and analytics for Business profiles without the full Facebook authentication, are no longer available.

Changing the data source for Business profiles with full authentication will ensure the best and most accurate analytics experience. These profile connections will be more reliable. It also allows us to be more agile in the future, with the potential to develop new metrics for Business profiles.

But, the new Graph API doesn't provide all the same information as the legacy API. So this change means some immediate impacts to Instagram analytics:

Metrics for Business profiles will include only organic likes and comments

Likes and comments are displayed in the Post Performance section, and in the following metrics in analytics reports: Post Likes, Post Comments, Engagement, Post Tables, and Top Posts.

Reports will continue to show both organic and paid data before January 1, 2020, while data going forward will only include organic engagement.

Note that Instagram displays both organic and paid data for Business profiles natively, so their likes and comments will no longer match Hootsuite.

The ability to compare by Instagram filter will be deprecated

Until now, the following metrics could be compared by Filter: Inbound Messages, Posts, Post Comments, Post Likes, and Post Video Views. As of January 17, 2020, this option will be removed for all Instagram profiles, and any existing reports comparing by Filter have been set to ‘Compare by Account’ by default.