Yext has announced the official release of Yext Social. This is a social media management tool meant for multi-location (MULO) brands to optimize their social presence & promotion. Given that it’s a MULO play, the value proposition rests on managing social activity at scale, and to do so through a single platform.
Yext is also framing it as an AI-powered engine. This is logical given not only AI’s positive spin these days, but Yext’s competence and investment in the technology. In other words, it’s not just marketing vapor but tangible AI integrations that do things like automate social monitoring and content creation.
To be fair, Yext already had tools in its platform to manage and optimize localized social marketing. Yext Social formalizes and federates those efforts into a single tool. This should resonate with MULO brand marketers who want more of a single-source offering to reduce social marketing headaches.
“We’ve always had a solution for Social, but the time was right in the maturity of our solution to add Social in the big way you see it today,” Yext VP of Product Management Chris Brownlee told Localogy Insider. “We are already gathering so much valuable information on behalf of brands, across the digital journey, and now we can garner even more through social interactions.”
Flywheel Effect
Going further under the hood, what does this all look like and how does it come together? Highlighting the AI aspects, as well as the single-platform benefits, Yext provided us with the following list of top features.
AI-Driven Content Creation: Generate tailored social media captions and posts that reflect local distinctions and audience preferences, saving time and enhancing relevancy.
Unified Platform Experience: Manage corporate and local social accounts from a single interface, streamlining workflows and providing consistency across all channels.
Advanced Analytics and Insights: Track engagement metrics and measure the success of local social efforts, helping brands refine their strategies and maximize return on investment.
Synthesizing these functions, a key attribute traces back to a phrase used above: federate. Bringing together social management tools in one place gives them a place to live together. If done right, that means a more powerful (and convenient) engine where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“Our full spectrum solution is ideal for brands that want to create a flywheel effect for their marketing,” said Brownlee, “to create a dynamo effect on their performance.”
Attributes of Automation
Beyond performance, it’s also about pain Relief. That not only comes through the single-platform orientation, but also brings us back to the topic of AI. As we keep saying, AI is most successful when it can be a pain pill for SMBs or brand marketers, helping automate the things that they dread doing.
That translates to rote aspects of marketing including writing headlines for social posts, or captions for images. This is not only where marketers are hamstrung… but where AI can shine these days. The technology isn’t ready to write the great American novel, but it’s quite functional as a marketing co-pilot.
“[Yext Social] is allowing us to surface our recommendations that are machine-learning and AI backed,” said Brownlee, “and provide the ability to dive deeper to understand the rationale for recommendations. And best of all our customers can execute these complete strategies with just a few clicks.”
Some of these benefits are already being validated in Yext’s early testing. Beta partners have echoed many of the sentiments above, particularly the welcome attributes of automation. According to Direct Clicks Social Media Specialist Kiana To, “The AI tool for caption generation is a game changer for us.”
