MeetEdgar offers automated variations for social posts for SMBs

Startup MeetEdgar provides a social media publishing application that lets small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) write, schedule and post their social marketing posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, soon, Instagram and Pinterest.

This week, the company — a virtual firm that is nominally based in Austin, Texas — is releasing a new feature that automatically pulls out text from relevant online articles to generate up to four additional posts. MeetEdgar says that, while some enterprise-focused social tools offer a similar capability, to its knowledge this is the first time it’s available for SMBs.

In a typical use case of the new feature, director of marketing Nancy Rothman told me, a small bakery might write and schedule multiple posts about, say, its cookies, cakes and specialty items.

But, to automatically generate posts about a new gluten-free line of baked goods, the bakery’s marketer creates an initial post with the URL of an article from which the additional posts will be pulled, such as a story about the virtues of gluten-free food.

After clicking a button to generate variations, the new feature then pulls a small amount content for up to four additional posts from that URL. The platform’s natural language processing selects the content extracts that it considers characteristic of the story’s topic.

If the page also contains a variety of other kinds of content in addition to the article, such as smaller stories, the platform will find the article by the length of the content, the size of the story headline and any special tags created by article publisher — which might be the bakery itself, if the article about gluten-free baked goods is on its own website.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.