Struggling to keep up with all the Tweets, Posts and ‘Grams? A University of Windsor professor has helped launch a company that takes the stress out of social media.

Computer science professor Robin Gras said his San Francisco-based Movyl Technologies not only automates the functions of composing, curating, scheduling and publishing content across social platforms but engages with influencers and learns from these functions over time.

“Movyl Technologies came at the junction of two very important phenomena that are currently happening,” said Dr. Gras, Movyl’s chief science officer. “One is the very fast increase in social media usage every day and the other is the explosion in new machine learning techniques.”

An expert in artificial intelligence (AI) applications including deep learning, machine learning and neural networks, Gras worked closely with the team at Movyl to develop one of the first smart social media marketing platforms that uses AI to provide marketers with insights that broaden a brand’s reach and engagement while saving them money, time and reducing labor costs.

With social media expected to make up more than 70 per cent of marketing budgets by 2021, marketers at small to large companies alike are looking for solutions to keep up with the ever-increasing need to develop and publish content and analyze the vast amounts of data generated by that content.

Gras explained that Movyl uses AI to analyze data and generate sophisticated predictive models in order to deliver more effective future outcomes. He said the platform gives marketers the tools and insights they need to create comprehensive online campaigns and assess the effectiveness of those campaigns based on the text and content that their audience shares across 15 social media networks.

Movyl Technologies uses artificial intelligence to automate the functions of composing, curating, scheduling and publishing content across social platforms while engaging with influencers and learning from these functions over time.

“Advanced machine learning techniques like deep learning, let our platform analyze and learn from very large amounts of data and use the information to make a future determination,” Gras said.

“With machine learning, marketers can now manage social campaigns in real time and have the AI adjust features dynamically as it learns the user’s preferences and the audience’s response. By entering a few keywords or basic information into the platform’s dashboard, the smart technology will scrape all the data on the Internet including social posts.”

Deep learning is a collection of algorithms that are capable of ingesting a lot more data than machine learning.

With AI collection and data analysis, Movyl lets marketers focus their team’s time on developing compelling storytelling. But Gras said he expects that is just the beginning.

“In the near future, I believe that the data collected through the AI will stretch beyond the social marketing departments to influence other business functions like product development or customer service,” he said.

Gras has been a professor at the University of Windsor since 2006 and is a former Canada Research Chair in Heuristics for Bioinformatics. Movyl Technologies launched its platform in May 2018. For more information about the company, visit its website at www.movyltech.net.

Dylan Kristy