Social media has become an integral part of marketing and public relations strategy of many businesses.  Companies are now utilizing social media channels to communicate their messages to their customers and the general public. However, with the vast social media landscape, managing these different accounts can be overwhelming. Not everyone has the time or resources to constantly update and monitor these sites.

 Beatrix, The Advanced Social Media Virtual Assistant

Beatrix, an app developed by Singapore-based entrepreneur Jon Yongfook, designed to help businesses manage social media accounts. Yongfook describes it as “a virtual intern who would help you create Twitter and Facebook content throughout the week? You’d define keywords and the intern would go out and create a content plan which you’d get to approve. Cheaper and faster than a real intern.”

How It Works

Sign Up Free and choose some keywords relevant to your brand.

Beatrix then generates a week of social content for you. You can tweak the plan if you want – delete the stuff you don’t like and keep the stuff you do like.  Beatrix will then adjust the plan accordingly.
Beatrix then does 3 things:

1. 1. Posts the content according to a schedule (which is completely user-customizable)

1. 1. Creates a new content plan every week and emails it to you for your approval, just like a real assistant.

1. In the background, the app gathers data on what your users are responding to and what you are removing from the content plans, in order to become smarter about what to post in the future.

Beatrix launched in August 2013, and Third Team Media tried it out. Here’s what we think of it:

Pros:

• Features are promising, including the ability to (1) plan a week of social content in seconds; (2) email you a new content plan every week to keep you in the loop; and (3) interact via the intuitive web interface, or simply send Beatrix emails, just like you would with a real assistant.
• Overall clean and sleek design that is very easy to use.
• Easy to set up.
• Keywords are readily available for the different types of business.
• Posts are automatically scheduled for optimal exposure three times per day. This can be edited.
• Copies are automatically generated (using the title of the article only). There is also an option to edit the copy.
• Content are curated / generated on a weekly basis. This ensures that we do not post stale content.

Cons:

• It is rather expensive to upgrade. Trial period is 7 days. Only 1 assistant (meaning 1 brand) can be created. Price for upgrade as follows:
• Enterprise: up to 15 assistants, $189 per month
• Business: up to 5 assistants, $59 per month
• Solo: 2 assistants, $29 per month.
• Available keywords are limited, and not target-specific. It would be easy for a business that has a clearly defined topic and wide scope of target demographic (e.g., restaurants). However, it would be a little harder to set up for a company with very specific niches (e.g., an HR firm looking to hire young IT professionals within the region). It would be a challenge to generate content that would be appropriate for their target audience.
• The app supports Facebook and Twitter profiles only.
• No variety of content. All curated contents are links to articles related to the chosen keywords. There is no option to manually insert images, videos, or status messages in the queued posts.

Overall Verdict:

Overall, we don’t think the features justify the cost just yet. Considering that Beatrix only supports Facebook and Twitter for now, and that there’s no option to include photos, videos, and status messages in the curation, businesses with a wider social media presence would still need to schedule posts via other third-party apps like HootSuite. It would be a redundant process. While Beatrix does a pretty good job of suggesting articles related to your industry and brand, Twitter search can be utilized for the same function at no cost.

We understand that Beatrix is still in its early form, and the next couple of months will be very exciting as it develops more features. Yongfook explains that there will be other developments to come:

The core value proposition is to create awesome social content in a frictionless way. We want social accounts powered by Beatrix plus a human boss to outperform social accounts managed by just a person.  

There’s so much more that we have in store for Beatrix. The Beatrix of the future should:

• • know when a relevant hashtag is trending, and tell me about it, and ideally give me suggestions on how I can use it;

• • know when relevant national holidays are coming up, and give me ideas for social content;

• remind me to post some ad-hoc content; have we hired anyone new, what did the team eat for lunch, what are we working on, what music are we listening to at the office… anything goes really!

While Beatrix doesn’t fully replace (but it could very well complement) the existing process of a social media consultant, it could become a helpful tool for many businesses. It certainly has the potential to cover the more basic tasks to help you build your brand online.

But for now, we suggest to not jump in on the virtual social media assistant bandwagon driven by Beatrix too soon. Let’s just wait for a couple more months, and give it time to grow.