Data-driven startup Aggie uses AI to manage small business social media

A new, AI-powered platform called Aggie wants to manage your brand’s social media. 

Aggie is a product of Audience Genomics, which has since 2018 offered audience data analytics to big brands like Universal Studios, AMC Television, and Fenty Beauty. The company soon also worked with private equity investors to evaluate the quality of marketing by companies they were considering investing in, which led to advising some small and medium-sized businesses on marketing, says founder and CEO Greg Weinstein. 

And as much as those businesses valued insights and analytics, they still found it challenging to actually produce a steady stream of marketing content to reach audiences on social media.

“What we learned from them was that they’re all short-staffed,” Weinstein says. “They all feel under the gun of feeding the never-ending beast of having to populate their social media channels.”

Realizing that the company had a large selection of data into what sorts of social media posts do well, including information that would-be competitors would find it hard to replicate now that social platforms have locked down access to automated tools, Audience Genomics created Aggie. It’s a one-stop tool that with a few clicks can generate a calendar of social media posts for platforms including Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and Threads, allow users to tweak it if they so desire, then schedule it to publish.

Aggie is informed by social media posts and website content previously published by that particular customer and others in the same industry and how they’ve fared, as well as guidance that users provide, like requesting that the software focus on a particular sale or product. It’s designed to create a diverse array of content, which can include a variety of images and captions ranging from quotes, tips, and tricks to information about specific goods and services to holiday greetings. 

A calendar’s worth of posts are generated in under five minutes, and typically in less than 60 seconds, says Stephen Esposito, the company’s lead investor and chief strategy officer. Keeping social media current is as important to reaching customers as maintaining a website was a couple of decades ago, he says. with younger customers in particular often dubious of businesses that don’t regularly post.

“If you do not have an Instagram, or you have not posted in the last six months, you appear to be closed to them,” he says.

When customers sign up for the service, which has plans starting at $79 per month with an annual subscription, they provide their company logos, which Aggie uses to generate a branded color scheme for future posts. Users can edit text and images before scheduling posts, or reject some entirely, but the tool is designed to quickly generate usable posts that busy business owners and social media managers can approve, then move on with their days. Pro level accounts, starting at $159 per month, offer more posts every month and enhanced analytics.

Sam Lavey, the marketing and social media director for boutique skincare startup Gleem Beauty, says before using Aggie, much of his time was spent coming up with ideas, graphics, captions, and hashtags for social posts. Now, Aggie can generate ready-to-use content for Gleem’s Instagram more or less instantaneously, though Lavey sometimes makes minor changes to the images, like inserting actual product images where the AI places imagined renderings. 

“What took me just way too much time is now taking me near minutes,” he says.

Recently, he’s also had success reusing Aggie-generated images and text in the beauty company’s newsletter, which drives a healthy number of Gleem’s sales. And in the future, Esposito says, the tool will likely be able to create videos and longer-form editorial content.

Aggie isn’t the only product that can generate marketing content with AI. Other online marketing tools have increasingly added automated options to generate social media, email, and other material, and marketers can do the same in a bit more steps with tools like ChatGPT. 

But Weinstein says the company’s wealth of data, experience in marketing, and attention to detail helps set it apart from the pack. For instance, he says, images that the product offers to customers come from an extensive library pre-generated and vetted by human experts, who use an in-house tool with a Tinder-like interface to accept or reject potential pictures.

“We built proprietary review and curation tools where every image actually goes through two layers of curation,” he says. 

The software is also designed to be simple to use, catering to busy professionals like lawyers, real estate brokers, and hair salon owners who either aren’t social media savvy—and may not care to be—or simply don’t have the time to devote to coming up with clever posts. Ideally, Weinstein says, it can help them compete for audience attention with bigger chains who’ve long had full-time social media staffing, something out of reach for most small businesses.

“They don’t have time to make social media a second job,” says Weinstein. “They’re busy doing their first job, and they don’t have the skills, energy or inclination to learn how to become their own personal social media manager.” 

https://www.fastcompany.com/91229922/aggie-uses-ai-to-manage-small-business-social-media?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss