AI Powered Yext Social to Boost Brand Local Engagement

Yext has launched Yext Social, which it hopes will establish a new standard in AI-powered local engagement. The tool enables brands to manage local-customer engagement at scale globally. Using personalized content created using data insights, Yext Social connects with customers and manages their experiences and interactions, all on a single platform. Yext has thousands of customers worldwide and has worked with Ohio Health, Haagen-Dazs, and Samsung. This expansion of the Yext platform is meant to simplify content creation, optimize engagement, and produce actionable insights. Brands can manage both their corporate and local social media from the Yext platform.

Some of the new features include:

• AI-Driven Content Creation, which can generate tailored social-media captions and posts that reflect local distinctions and audience preferences.
• A Unified Platform Experience to 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. Using these insights, brands can refine their strategies and maximize return on investment.

Yext, recently acquired Hearsay Systems, a global leader in digital client engagement for financial services, in part, for Hearsay Social, a leading social media management tool for financial services companies looking to deliver compliant customer engagement and communications.

Yext client Direct Clicks Inc., uses Yext Social for its AI caption-generation tool.  Chris Brownlee, VP, Product Management at Yext, talked more with StreetFight about this new tool.

Did Yext never have a local social engagement tool before now?

Yext has 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.

What does success look like for a brand that uses this tool?

The Yext Social solution is all about being able to create content that resonates at the local level. The typical social solution leaves brands creating one piece of content that then gets posted a thousand times, and often gets middling results due to the algorithms downgrading the visibility of repetitive content.  With Yext, brands can lean into the power of creating content that will resonate within their community, which in turn, leads to higher engagement, improved brand sentiment, and ultimately more sales and brand advocates.

What can Yext do now that it couldn’t before? How does AI work in this situation?

At Yext, 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. This is allowing us to gather insights at one touch point and then learn how to adjust strategies in other parts to maximize what is working. In terms of AI, our Content Creation solution can generate tailored social media captions and posts that reflect local distinctions and audience preferences, saving time and enhancing relevancy.

Which social media platforms does this solution work across?

Within social media, we cover the core networks: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profiles, Apple and post to your local landing page.

Can this solution be applied across social to include creators? How would it reach audiences for creator content?

At this point we are really focused on optimizing the power of localization, creating posts at scale across thousands of locations without being [like a] cookie cutter, as opposed to a brand strategy where you might leverage creator content to break into new audiences.

Which verticals are best suited to use this new tool?

The power of our solution really stands out for multi-location brands that need to manage a large footprint of locations or workforce. Within this space, we’ve found product market fit with food and beverage, retail, agencies, and healthcare.