X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, plans to double down on using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the user and advertising experience on the platform, as the Elon Musk-owned firm outlined its focus areas for the year 2024.
The company said on January 9 that AI will power various experiences on the platform including improving the search feature and advertisements to “fueling a new level of customer understanding” among others, however it didn’t disclose any specific information.
Musk’s AI startup xAI will help improve X’s “See Similar Posts” feature by showing more relevant and important content to users. An upcoming feature “See Dissimilar Posts” will encourage users to “challenge their perspectives” based on their past activity in a bid to improve the quality and balance of information they see on the platform, the company said in a blogpost.
xAI’s ChatGPT-like AI chatbot Grok has been rolled out to the subscribers of X Premium+, the top subscription tier on X. The chatbot was extended to nearly 47 countries including India in December 2023.
X said it will also launch peer-to-peer payments that will offer new opportunities for commerce on the platform, the company says. Payments is a key part of Musk’s plan to turn X into an “everything app”, akin to so-called super-apps such as China’s WeChat that combine several internet services within a single app.
Immersive video, a new surface that X introduced this year, now has over 100 million daily users, with more than half of them belonging to Gen Z, the company said.
Brand safety solutions
The social media platform also plans to strengthen its full-funnel ads offering and partner with industry leaders to bring in more brand safety capabilities and verification through its partnership with Integral Ad Science.
The move came as X faced a major advertiser exodus in the past few months, with companies such as Apple, Disney, IBM, Walmart, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Sony among others pausing their advertising campaigns on the platform after Musk’s recent endorsement of antisemitic posts.
Many marketing agencies do not plan to resume advertising and have even advised advertisers to stop posting on the platform, after Musk recently cursed brands with expletives, according to The New York Times that noted that more than 200 advertisers halted their spending on the platform after Musk’s endorsement.
Advertising sales, which still account for a major part of the company’s revenues, are reportedly projected to fall to about $2.5 billion in 2023.
To shore up its advertising revenue, X is now reportedly wooing small and medium-sized businesses as well as eyeing political ad spends ahead of the forthcoming elections across several countries.
In its blogpost, X said that it released a suite of brand safety solutions in 2023 and made advertising more relevant and impactful by bringing its organic and ads algorithms closer together, apart from introducing new products and content partnerships to help advertisers drive full-funnel outcomes. Full-funnel marketing campaigns cover all stages of the customer journey, from awareness to consideration and then purchase.
The social media firm also shared its progress over the year, including various features and product enhancements it rolled out in 2023.
The company’s live audio chat feature Spaces has also received infrastructure upgrades and it clocked nearly 30 million different conversations in 2023, it said.
Besides this X now has over 350,000 communities with people spending over 300 million minutes every day and creating around 650,000 posts on a daily basis, the firm said.