Hootsuite Acquires Heyday, a Conversational AI Company, for $48 Million

Vancouver-based Hootsuite lets companies track social-network channels to see what people are saying about their brands and respond in real time.

Hootsuite bought Montreal-based Heyday because companies have expanded their use of social media beyond marketing to include commerce and one-on-one messaging, said

Tom Keiser,

Hootsuite’s chief executive.

“You really can do the entire customer life cycle now, all the way through selling and support, on the social and messaging platforms,” Mr. Keiser said. “With the acquisition of Heyday, we get a really strong base of AI capabilities that we’ll be able to use in social care and across the other aspects of our business,” he added, referring to customer service via social media.

The deal is Hootsuite’s second acquisition this year, following its January purchase of Sparkcentral, a provider of digital customer-support software-as-a-service.

Companies are increasingly using chatbots for all types of customer service and some other tasks.

Southwest Airlines Co.

uses a chatbot to answer questions from prospective employees.

According to a report from

Salesforce.com Inc.,

38% of companies were using chatbots in 2020, up from 23% in 2018.

Social-media management platforms are likely to keep bolting on new capabilities, said Andrew Frank, vice president and analyst at research and advisory company

Gartner Inc.

“You’ll probably continue to see more acquisitions and possibly some more consolidation,” Mr. Frank said. “It is still a pretty fragmented market, and there’s room for more integration and for a lot of these kinds of applications to become more part of the mainstream marketing cloud world.”

Customer service has become intertwined with social media, said Jen Heal, a social-media consultant.

“These sorts of capabilities—AI technologies—are really needed to streamline that process and to make sure that customers are being given the priority and the attention they deserve,” Ms. Heal said. “It really is one of the biggest touch points for selling and customers expect an answer within an hour, if not sooner.”

Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at ann-marie.alcantara@wsj.com