Grok is X’s answer to Stories, offering news summaries powered by AI.
The way that people use X, formerly known as Twitter, has changed in recent years and Elon Musk is looking to shake things up once more. A new AI-powered feature, known as Grok, has been added to the platform and rolled out to subscribers in the UK.
As social media and other digital services look to AI to make their platforms more digestible, we look at how Grok works and what it means for social media marketing. Grok is currently only available to premium X subscribers, but that could change in the future.
Grok is a large language model (LLM) platform, which fundamentally means it uses AI to recognise and generate text. Grok is more creative than that, however, with capabilities ranging from translating languages and writing different disparate content forms to answering questions in an imaginative way.
In fact, according to the official description, Grok is able to tackle “spicy” questions “with a bit of wit and a rebellious streak”. In an area that seeks to see natural language processing (NLP) mimic human speech as closely as possible, sassy or sarcastic answers is not the route most providers are looking to go with this, but then again, Musk is not your average CEO.
The main features of Grok are:
So, why are we telling you all of this? AI is set to become ubiquitous across the internet, from Google’s Gemini model to AI image generators, making it important to understand the nuances of this technology. While there’s lots of doom-mongering about its emergence, marketers shouldn’t fear AI and instead embrace its potential in an ethical manner.
There are a number of ways that marketers can take advantage of Grok and its AI features to improve their brand’s reach. Adapting to new elements on social media platforms before competitors can ensure businesses stay ahead of the curve.
Some of the benefits of Grok include:
Anyone who has done any social media marketing knows that these platforms have targeting tools built into them and Grok is set to turbocharge these options on X. The model utilises data integration and analytics for highly targeted campaigns, which means greater returns on the time, money and resources you put in.
Going beyond the usual demographic information most networks can offer, Grok has the capability to go granular in its approach. Whatever you think about AI, it’s hard to think of a marketer that wouldn’t be excited by the prospect of achieving such resonance with an audience through exact precision every time.
Personalisation is no longer a nice-to-have marketing technique but an absolute necessity in terms of interacting with leads. AI goes way beyond simply using your audience’s first name in an email or message, and when combined with human-centric strategies can be very powerful.
Grok’s ability to analyse behavioural data promises to be next level, which is presumably what allows for those “spicy” responses. In the quest for true personalisation, Grok’s tailored experiences could be the difference between standard interactions and developing genuine connections with customers.
While it’s becoming increasingly clear that content creation will retain the need for human input no matter how advanced AI becomes, there are areas where it can certainly help. Streamlining workflows to save time is definitely one of them.
Grok could be used for ideation, drafting outlines and providing focus to articles, blog posts and social media posts. The result of which is likely to be increased frequency of posting as resources can go further, and in turn, better results.
At Axonn, we love data. It’s like the magic key that unlocks the door to success in a future campaign based on what’s worked in the past. Grok can perform wide scale analysis on large volumes of text data, turning it into valuable insights.
It can be used on a selection of digital sources including social media conversations. So, instead of needing to scroll through pages and pages of messages, marketers can use Grok’s summaries to understand what’s been said efficiently and take the appropriate action.
It’s worth remembering that AI is a new technology and many of its potential pitfalls have yet to be ironed out. There have been a number of examples of AI getting it wrong on the road to this point in its development, with Google’s new search summaries not always being accurate.
Proceed with caution and combine AI tools such as Grok with human common sense to get the best of both worlds. Grok may not be ready to replace marketers but it could help us achieve impressive results in our campaigns.
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