Echobox wants to be your dedicated, AI Social Media assistant and Poll Tracker

by Startacus Admin

There’s a fair bit of stuff going on at Echobox - so forgive us if we try to summarise.

Firstly, Echobox uses AI to intelligently automate content distribution on social media for media companies and publishers - taking over the logistics and legwork of social media management.

Basically, it is an AI tool and it takes on the role of your social media assistant. They've even given it a name -  Larry. (Hmmm... wonder if Larry has to respect the EU working time directives for working hours!!)

From a publishing perspective, we believe that Larry sounds pretty handy to be fair. Echobox tells us that Larry can help you select catchy, summarising share messages that will resonate with your audience. Larry also searches for relevant hashtags and adds them to your shares so that your content always forms part of a bigger conversation. Damn, Larry sounds good.

The Echobox AI disrupts journalism in general and the data science aspect of it in particular because their algorithms take over the logistics and legwork of social media, freeing up newsroom resource which can be devoted to creative tasks instead.

Larry can A/B test different headlines and images to provide you with valuable best practice, it analyzes your historical and real-time data to create an entire social media strategy for you, and it will also keep an eye on what's currently trending and what your followers are talking about to adapt your social media strategy in real-time. Larry, sounds like he needs to chill out a bit! Don’t you need a break and a coffee Larry?

If you think that Larry sounds a little pie in the sky - think on. Larry’s already been working pretty hard with some major clients. The performance of its AI has helped Echobox to secure deals with leading publishers including Le Monde, Le Figaro and Axel Springer. "Social media optimisation requires a more scientific approach. Since using Echobox we have seen a major upswing in our traffic," says Anne Pican, Digital Publisher at Le Figaro. Rebecca Hanke of German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung says that "Social media is more than just posting links to articles. Facebook in particular requires a lot of experimentation. Echobox gives us the time we need to do this."

But it seems that this is only half of the story…

Echobox Insights showcases what they have learned about AI, social media and journalism in the digital age by building the first artificial intelligence that understands the meaning of content. Aw shucks - that’s like two startup businesses for the price of one!

Echobox are also looking to disrupt polling by using big data to track election campaigns. Pretty timely with the French election just happening and the UK General Election on our doorstep.

Their French Election Tracker has been live for the last month or so and is an hourly tracker of the interest that each French presidential election candidate attracts online, based on the news consumption behaviour of millions of French voters. It compares the amount of news traffic generated by the candidates in the French presidential election in real time.



It answers a simple question. Which candidate is attracting the most interest (both positive and negative) at any given moment. Journalists, politicians and the general public can use the FET to quickly assess the current state of the election campaign and to trace a candidate's fortunes over time.

Last week, we promised to keep an eye on startups that had politics, elections, polling or political activism at their heart - to make sure that we gave some ‘startup’ related focus to the imminent UK general election.

We hope that much like the French Election Tracker we will see an Echobox UK Election Tracker go live over the next week or so - after all polling experts have had a pretty hard time in forecasting election results the last while - so we reckon that Echobox insights could be a fab way to keep up to date with who’s potentially, hot, not, and just generally being talked about during the UK general election build up.

We look forward to hearing more about Echobox over the coming weeks and months - we LOVE what you are doing.

If you like this AI related article, you might want to read:

• LISA, AI Robot Lawyer at Large

• Replika - The AI chatbot that learns to mimic...YOU

And why not read about UK startup PostBug is an ‘online-to-postage’ website allowing groups of people to send similar postcards or letters to public figures…such as politicians...hmmm

• #big data
• #data
• #data science
• #ai
• #social media assistant
• #social media
• #echobox
• #larry ai
• #politics
• #polling
• #election polls
• #journalism
• #publishing
• #general election
• #french election

Published on: 23rd April 2017