From big-picture strategy all the way through to caption creation, AI tools have become critical resources for social media teams. The challenge for social marketers is that AI tools need to be trained, and their knowledge can sometimes lag behind social’s fast pace.
That all changes with the introduction of social AI — a new form of AI that draws on real-time content and data directly from social media (and not just websites, blogs, and forums).
We couldn’t be more excited to mention that Hootsuite’s OwlyGPT is the world’s first social AI tool. Keep reading to learn more about how it works and what it can do for your social strategy.
Key takeaways
- Social AI is a new kind of artificial intelligence built specifically for social marketers. Unlike traditional AI tools, it pulls in real-time data from social platforms to deliver insights that are fresh, relevant, and strategy-ready.
- Social AI makes your whole team smarter, faster, and more aligned. Whether you’re refining brand voice, reacting to a reputation issue, or onboarding a new teammate, it acts like a plugged-in strategist who knows your audience, your goals, and what’s happening on social right now.
Social AI is a new frontier in artificial intelligence. Its knowledge base is updated in real time using publicly searchable web information and real-time cross-platform social data (a.k.a. social listening).
Social AI understands your brand — and your questions — in the context of real-time factors like:
- What are your competitors doing on social media today?
- How are social media users talking about your industry at this very moment?
- How are people engaging with your brand this week?
How is social AI different from other AI tools?
Like existing artificial intelligence tools, social AI allows you to ask anything. You can then refine the responses until you get the exact output you’re looking for.
Unlike regular AI, social AI provides responses and recommendations based on social trends and conversations happening right now. It’s your real-time social-driven assistant that knows your brand and understands your social strategy.
Hootsuite’s social AI tool, OwlyGPT, taps into real-time social listening data via Blue Silk AI and Talkwalker’s leading social dataset. This gives it a huge advantage for queries and tasks related to strategy, trends, or industry analysis. (There’s a reason why social listening is the number two priority for brands, right after marketing to or engaging with their audience.)
Actually, OwlyGPT helps with all of those things. It incorporates social data with deep AI-driven insights about your brand. It knows your voice, tone, audience, and goals based on your connected social accounts. It’s customized for you and your audience right out of the box. And since it’s built into your Hootsuite account, you never need to copy and paste between your AI tool and your social media management dashboard.
You can ask OwlyGPT anything and gain real-time insights that apply across your organization. From your Hootsuite dashboard, choose OwlyGPT in the navigation panel, or select Start with AI in the main menu.
Then, just start your conversation with OwlyGPT by asking a question.
Here are some specific tips for how to use social AI in key areas of your social strategy.
Trend discovery
OwlyGPT gathers information from your brand from the social accounts you’ve connected to Hootsuite. But you can always specify something different (like an imaginary ceramics studio in Vermont!) if you want to research your side hustle, a new project, or anything else.
Trend discovery is such an important part of social AI that you can actually start your AI-powered trends research with one click. Just choose What’s trending in my industry from the list of suggested prompts on the OwlyGPT main screen.
Content creation and planning
Planning out a content calendar across multiple platforms every month takes up a ton of time. Unless, of course, you ask social AI to do it.
Provide any refining prompts you need to tweak the content calendar to your liking. Once you’re happy, you can ask OwlyGPT to draft the necessary social posts, or create scripts for video content.
Unlike other generative AI tools, OwlyGPT starts with an inherent understanding of your brand from the social profiles connected to your Hootsuite account. Your content sounds like you, right from the start. This resolves one of the biggest challenges of using generative AI to create social content before you even begin.
Sentiment analysis
It’s important to understand the context in which you’re creating social content. Sentiment analysis provides that context by revealing what people think about you, your competitors, or your industry.
If you notice something in the sentiment analysis that you want to dig into, ask a follow-up question. OwlyGPT will even suggest some follow-up prompts for you. In this case we clicked on the suggested prompt to learn more about leveraging positive social sentiment tied to supporting local businesses.
Competitive analysis
Who’s your competition? OwlyGPT knows. If you’re still in the early stages of competitor research, you can simply ask OwlyGPT to tell you who the most important competitive accounts are.
Once you understand the competitive landscape, you can ask more specific questions. You’ll start to learn what types of content are performing best for your competitors. This helps you learn from their successes and mistakes, not just your own.
Campaign strategy
Planning a new social campaign? Give OwlyGPT a few details about what you’re trying to accomplish. It will provide strategic recommendations for the right messaging, social platforms, and collaborations.
1. Create content that REALLY resonates
One of social media’s great advantages is how quickly you can see the impact of your efforts. By tracking your social media analytics, you can understand what kind of content resonates best with your audience. Then, adjust your paid and organic social strategy in real time.
Social AI takes this to the next level. It allows you to parse audience response across multiple platforms. You can understand how your audience really feels about your brand and your content, not just how much they engage.
For example, one NBA team started monitoring social sentiment around the tone of their content. They quickly learned that their audience preferred original content and behind-the-scenes footage over league-approved content and game clips.
Based on this insight, they shifted their content mix so that 50% of their social posts are now original content (up to 80% on Instagram). This new focus on giving fans what they want led to a 44% increase in overall impressions across social platforms and a 32% increase in video views.
And social AI does more than give you these insights — it helps you put them into practice. OwlyGPT can generate detailed post ideas and even write the captions for you, in your brand’s tone. Then, just click Create post to send your AI-generated content straight to Composer to polish and schedule.
2. Learn from your audience (and competitors) in real time
Hootsuite’s social AI knows your brand based on the social accounts you’ve connected to Hootsuite. That makes it a useful conversation partner for understanding your audience and your competition.
Using conversational prompts, you can conduct analytical tasks without having to crunch numbers or open a report.
OwlyGPT provides immediate audience and competitor insights that:
- Inform campaign positioning and planning
- Reveal emerging industry trends
You’ll get specific content and strategy recommendations tailored to your industry, competitors, and audience that you can implement right away.
For example, Dubai TV Channels monitored audience response to their TV shows in real time as each episode aired. This helped them guide their TV content production. It was also useful for choosing which shows should continue into future seasons.
3. Shape brand strategy beyond the social team
That last example highlights that OwlyGPT is more than a social tool. In fact, it can act as a global focus group, providing insights that impact the entire organization, not just the social team.
For example, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners monitored mentions of the term “telehealth” on social media. The goal was to validate their understanding that this was an important service GPs wanted to offer and patients wanted to access. This insight informed their organizational strategy going forward, not just their social campaigns.
Working with social AI helps you understand how your audience feels about you, and about your competitors. You can ask for help to reinforce positive sentiment, or counter negative perceptions.
Social AI can then help you solidify your brand truth, values, and voice. It can create tone-of-voice guidelines. It can even help you prove the value of your social performance, and your industry research.
4. Boost engagement with the latest trends
Social AI provides real-time insights based on actual social conversations. That’s something no other AI tool can do. It’s your best resource for finding cutting-edge trends that are just starting to take off, so you can get ahead of the competition.
We’re not just talking trending audio or memes. You can discover trending hashtags, emerging formats, and new audience opportunities.
Once you find a trend you want to explore, you can ask OwlyGPT to create a post caption, video script, or campaign plan. With a few clicks, your trend-based content is ready to go into your Hootsuite workflow.
While your competitors are still brainstorming, your content is getting stakeholder sign-off and hitting your followers’ feeds. You’re already on your way to getting that early social engagement and sending juicy value signals to the algorithms!
5. Spot crises early — and know how to handle them
Sure, it’s great that social AI can help you connect better with your audience. But it’s even more important that social AI can alert you when things start to go sideways.
Your brand reputation is one of your most valuable assets. Just like social AI helps you spot fun trends early, it can also flag trends that are heading in the wrong direction. If social sentiment is shifting downward, you want to know why — fast.
For example, look at Ochsner Health, Louisiana’s largest nonprofit academic healthcare system. They automatically track negative sentiment about their brand on social media, as well as medical misinformation. They have a set list of approved responses in place for negative feedback. They also have a specific workflow for handling more serious issues.
If you spot an emerging brand crisis, you can ask OwlyGPT what to do about it. That might mean a quick strategy shift, cutting off a campaign early, or even pausing all scheduled social posts. Sentiment insights from social AI help you know what’s needed in the moment to right the ship.
6. Stay on brand with zero effort
OwlyGPT understands your brand based on the social media channels connected to your Hootsuite account. When you ask it to draft a social post, it inherently knows how to speak in your brand voice and tone. Like we said earlier, it can even create tone-of-voice guidelines for you if you haven’t quite solidified the details yet.
That means you never have to spend time training your social AI for content creation. And you don’t have to worry that it’s going to hallucinate details about your brand. It knows you, for you.
This also cuts way down on the amount of time spent onboarding new members to your social team. They can implement their ideas right away, and OwlyGPT provides the institutional knowledge they haven’t yet had a chance to learn.
Hint: AI competencies are no longer optional for social media teams. Social AI will have the greatest benefit for onboarding if new team members come in with a solid understanding of AI tools.
OwlyGPT writes by default in your brand voice in an appropriate style for the social network you specify. That said, you can always tell it to switch things up if inspiration strikes.
Our social trends research shows that brands are experimenting with tone, humor, and authenticity on Threads and X. As you develop content for these social media platforms, try asking social AI to make your caption funny, even if that’s not your usual vibe.
You can provide feedback to each response OwlyGPT provides with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down until you get precisely the caption you want. You’ll still sound recognizably like your brand, just with a little more pizazz.
Still using AI that’s stuck in the past? OwlyGPT is the only social AI assistant trained on today — not the archives. It scours live social feeds to generate powerful insights and content based on what your audience is talking about online right now. Try it free today.
