We recently got accepted onto the Hootsuite Developer Platform with our content gathering tool ModQ.

ModQ lets you easily collect images, video and text from your team, volunteers or public audience so that you can broadcast fresh, relevant content. You can post directly to social networks from the tool but as Hootsuite is such a popular platform we wanted to work hand in hand with those guys so that people can gather the content in ModQ but view their reporting as normal with Hootsuite.

The first step, once accepted on the developer programme, was to create a Laravel Hootsuite Provider. Using Socialite as a starting point, we extended it to include Hootsuite support. We then were able to get access tokens to get an array of a Hootsuite user’s profiles so that each time they want to schedule something we can ask them which network profile they want to publish to.

The actual posting of content through Hootsuite is done with a combination of a Twitter app and Ow.ly – and gets rather clever with you needing to create a secret sign-in key and send a signature with each request. When we had a bit of a head-scratching moment with the security hoops we used Postman to compare our output to that in the Hootsuite docs and soon got back on track!

The end result is that now ModQ users can set up their individual networks and post to them directly, or if they prefer sync up their Hootsuite account and post via that instead. Everything can still be handled within ModQ but a record of all your posts and their results is also in Hootsuite for comparison with your regular social broadcasts.

The integration also means ModQ users can now post directly to Instagram if they have a Business profile – a feature we’re very excited about!

If you need any API integration done, or even need an API built, please do drop us a line.