Glystn, a next-generation social intelligence platform founded in 2021, has unveiled what co-founder and CEO Ethan Fassett calls “Glystn 2.0,” an AI-powered chat interface designed to transform how marketers access and analyze social data across various platforms.

“Glystn uses next-generation AI to make social data accessible and understandable for brands, agencies, and publishers who want nuanced trends on consumer interests, social shifts, or new markets,” explains Ethan. “We can analyze creator data at a level that hasn’t been possible before.”

The new tool addresses a notable market gap: while traditional social listening tools provide basic metrics and sentiment analysis, they fail to deliver the nuanced insights marketers truly need. “Traditional tools are passive, built on old frameworks that just track post counts and basic sentiment,” says Ethan. “They don’t explain why sentiment shifts or provide deeper detail.”

Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT lack access to comprehensive social data due to restrictions on crawling. “LLMs can’t see social data very well because they’re blocked from completely crawling it, and don’t have a timely snapshot,” Ethan explains. “Gemini can’t crawl Meta. Meta and Gemini can’t crawl TikTok. So you have huge gaps in what an LLM can tell you.”

According to Ethan, this creates a blind spot for businesses. While LLMs can discuss consumer trends, their knowledge is derived from a blend of sources, including expert opinions, news outlets, and other public content that may not accurately reflect genuine consumer voices.

Glystn combines the best of both worlds: “We take the reasoning power of an LLM and apply it only to social data,” says Ethan. “Now you can talk to social data the same way you talk to an LLM, but the insights are always grounded in what’s actually being said in the creator economy.”

A Conversational Interface for Social Intelligence

Glystn’s previous versions already employed advanced AI for specific use cases, such as summarizing comments or providing targeted analyses. The new update, however, introduces an element Ethan says changes how users interact with the system.

“This version has a ‘fully agentic architecture,'” Ethan says. “You can fluently talk to data, ask all kinds of questions, and it responds in line. It still does the structured analyses of prior versions, but now everything is seamlessly built into the UX. It’s a much more powerful, cohesive product.”

The interface resembles familiar AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, creating an accessible user experience. When a user poses a question about trends, consumer interests, or market developments, the system analyzes the query’s intent, then develops a search strategy to find relevant social content.

“The first thing it does is understand what I’m asking,” Ethan explains during a demo. “An agent analyzes the intent, then figures out how to get the answer. What it just did there was create a search strategy.”

This multi-step analytical process happens almost instantaneously, delivering insights that would traditionally require extensive manual research and analysis.

Transparency Through ‘Receipts’ and TikTok Integration

Unlike black-box AI systems, Glystn shows users the exact social posts that informed its analysis. “We always show you the receipts,” Ethan says. “These are the posts that inform your answers, if you want.”

This transparency serves a dual purpose. Beyond building trust in the insights provided, it transforms Glystn into a creator discovery platform. Users can save the creators driving specific trends or conversations into customized lists for future reference.

“In that sense, Glystn is also a nuanced discovery tool,” says Ethan. “You ask key questions, it shows you a view, then highlights the people driving those micro trends.”

These creator lists become part of the user’s dashboard, where they can view and manage creators they’ve identified through their queries. Users can refine these lists based on criteria such as creator size or specific content themes, creating targeted creator segments for monitoring.

Additionally, Glystn’s new interface offers users the ability to search for TikTok creators and trends directly within the platform, allowing them to identify trends and understand what resonates with TikTok audiences.

Cross-Platform Analysis

Building on its multi-platform data access, Glystn enables direct comparison between different social networks. For example, users can ask follow-up questions, such as “What are the differences in trends between Instagram and TikTok?” to receive detailed breakdowns of how specific topics or content types perform differently across the platforms.

“This is a perennial question,” notes Ethan. “Now you can really see what those differences are.”

This capability helps users understand the unique characteristics of different platforms’ audiences and content patterns, providing a more nuanced view of the social space than single-platform analysis could offer.

From Quick Insights to Deep Analysis

Glystn’s platform operates at multiple analytical levels, from quick trend identification to thorough market intelligence. These capabilities were designed to address various marketing scenarios, from urgent response needs to strategic planning.

At the deeper end of this spectrum are Glystn’s “Deep Listening Reports,” which provide detailed analysis of specific market segments or topics.

“Right now, it’s rereading our whole conversation to figure out what this is really about,” Ethan says. “If you want to do deep research, it identifies themes, lets you refine the scope, and produces a detailed report.”

Ethan shares an example of how a customer created a report on GLP-1 medications to identify key trends like the “Off-Ramp Crisis,” where users express anxiety about stopping medication, user-led side effect management strategies, and the emerging debate between pharmaceutical options and natural alternatives. The analysis mapped the entire conversation field, showing how different audiences, from medical professionals to wellness influencers to actual medication users, shape the narrative and drive engagement around specific concerns.

Role-Specific AI Prompts: Tailored Intelligence

Recognizing that different marketing professionals have distinct information needs, Glystn has developed specialized prompt templates for various roles within the marketing field.

“Just like you can prompt an LLM, you can prompt Glystn,” Ethan explains. “We’ve created pre-built prompts for different roles so they can use the system powerfully.”

For example, creative directors can access prompts designed to generate insight-led creative briefs based on social data. These briefs include trending topics, engagement drivers, content themes, styles that are working, and even suggestions for new approaches.

“This isn’t just giving me top-line posts,” Ethan describes. “It looks at how creators are talking about back-to-school, correlates that with engagement, identifies what’s driving interest and what’s not, and then breaks it down for me.”

The resulting brief, Ethan adds, provides creative teams with an understanding of the conversation area, including creative concepts, examples from influential creators, narratives to avoid, and potential new directions to explore.

Transforming Marketing Workflows

The biggest impact of Glystn’s capabilities is on marketing workflows. Tasks that previously required extensive research by teams of associates can now be completed almost instantly, changing how marketing professionals allocate their time and resources.

“This helps teams boot up immediately on any new trend, market, client, competitor, or crisis,” Ethan explains. “What used to take associates weeks to research now takes seconds.”

He believes this acceleration can be particularly valuable for agencies pitching new business. “If they’re pitching a new client and asked, ‘Who are your competitors? What do you do?’ They’d have to spend weeks. Now they can get answers instantly,” Ethan says.

New Developments and Impact

Glystn plans to expand its capabilities in several directions, including “more platforms, more data,” says Ethan. He also teases a new feature: “We’re releasing an MCP [Model Context Protocol] soon – think of it as a smart API [Application Programming Interface]. It’ll open up a ton of use cases.”

While Glystn currently focuses primarily on brands and publishers, Ethan sees broader applications developing. 

“We want to keep expanding, unlocking insights and trends for more people across the creator economy,” he explains. “We’re focused on brands and publishers now, but this is a horizontal play. Trend data in seconds can help product managers, engineers, sales teams… anyone who wants to understand trends and attitudes of consumers and culture.”

A Vision for Creator Economy Intelligence

Ultimately, Glystn’s mission extends beyond providing another tool for marketers. The platform aims to transform how businesses understand and engage with the creator economy by making previously inaccessible insights instantly available.

“This accelerates time to value,” Ethan explains. “You get trends immediately – time to sale, time to insights, time to strategy – all completely compressed.

In summary, Glystn’s platform was designed to help brands and marketers understand consumer voice at scale, identify emerging trends before competitors, and make decisions based on social intelligence rather than limited samples or educated guesses.

As Ethan concludes, “What you get back is the world’s opinion, the average person’s view. You can go deeper into any thread, see the creators driving it, save them, engage them, and run powerful analyses.”

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