This new AI-powered social marketing tool can predict engagement or write the post for you

A rebranded startup is today launching an AI-powered social marketing tool that it says can boost engagement, and even write the post.

Post Intelligence, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2015 as MyLikes by ex-Google execs Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan. The company is rebranding today under the new name, as it unveils a beta of its new intelligent social marketing app for Web and Android, called Pi.

Pi tracks social trends and a user’s history of social posts to predict engagement (e.g., likes and shares), recommend content, learn what works, and even generate posts.

The company said it constructs a deep neural network for each user’s social media feed to build custom models of engagement prediction. The engagement is predicted as 0 to 10, with 0 showing little engagement, 5 a typical amount and 10 a boost. Reddy told me that Pi can accurately predict 85 percent of the time whether engagement will be less, typical or boosted, with an 80 confidence threshold.

A user can post to multiple pages on multiple platforms through Pi and schedule when the posts will run, for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Support for Instagram and Snapchat is on the drawing board.

Pi can also recommend links to content that will increase engagement for that post, provide a list of suggested topics and suggest the best posting time to receive the most engagement. Here’s a screen shot from the web version:

Over time, Post Intelligence said, the model learns the user’s posting patterns and can actually construct a short post on a given topic and send it out. Post Intelligence offers the following example of how a user interested in politics might communicate what she wants to send out:

“Hi Pi, Post a tweet about how disappointed I am with the new healthcare bill and millions losing insurance.” The AI would understand the meaning behind the sentence and in real-time find data about the healthcare bill and compose a tweet with a link to an article about healthcare.

example – ‘Totally bummed that 20+ million will be losing health care under the new GOP plan.’ http://healthcarelink”

Pi also has a sponsored content functionality, based on a previous product from the company’s days as MyLikes. It is designed to recommend content from more than 30 partnering publishers to social media influencers with more than 10,000 followers on the supported platforms, based on matches to the influencer’s best-performing content.

The recommended content — from Huffington Post, Bored Panda, Simplemost and others — can be posted by the influencer as a link with a blurb and image or video. When the influencer’s followers click on the link, or when they view a shared video, the influencer gets a referral fee.