Social media has moved away from being just a platform where people share information and chat with friends and family. Smart companies have taken advantage of the platform's enormous potential and are using social media for Ecommerce, customer service, marketing, public relations, and more.
However, managing social media and all its moving parts is no small task. You have to create content, share that content at appropriate times, interact with your audience, monitor activities, manage paid ads, analyze data, and create reports.
It's almost impossible to carry out all these tasks manually and efficiently. When you factor in other business areas that require your attention, you'd probably end up collapsing under the weight of it all.
But with the aid of artificial intelligence tools like Socialbakers (now Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud), marketers can choose the right social strategy for their campaigns, track audience behaviors, analyze the performance of their marketing efforts, and carry out a host of other activities that would otherwise be too cumbersome for them to handle.
With more time on your hands and less effort required to pull off successful campaigns, you can focus on the more creative aspects of your marketing operations.
How artificial intelligence can help your business:
Streamline processes
Understand your customers
Target leads better than you ever imagined possible
In this article, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about AI and how you use it to optimize your social media marketing strategy.
With AI powering your social channels, you'll be able to stand out from the competition, forge a stronger connection with your audience, and improve your bottom line.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is the ability of computers to imitate intelligent human behavior using algorithms and historical data. It basically uses machine learning to understand everything there is to know about a process.
Then AI uses that knowledge to efficiently manage tasks and make predictions, recommendations, or decisions that would normally require human effort and brainpower.
For example, an artificial intelligence tool can gather information about prospective customers such as the products they like, when they like to post on social media, how they use their accounts, and even what kind of content they engage with.
After analyzing these insights, it can determine which marketing message would be more likely to resonate with your target audience.
Consider how Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon make recommendations of shows and movies you might like based on your viewing history – that's AI in action.
Research shows that artificial intelligence can boost business productivity by 40%. Smart technologies like this can positively impact your social media marketing efforts. Everything you do, from content strategy to social media analytics, can be improved to enhance results using artificial intelligence.
How to implement AI into your social media strategy
Artificial intelligence is transforming the social media marketing landscape. Some of the ways you can harness the power of AI for social media include:
Content creation and management
Content is what gets your audience to engage with your brand. Creating content for your social media pages can take hours, and you'll still have to distribute it, manage interactions, and keep an eye on it to see how well it does.
AI social media tools can learn how your brand voice, what kind of content appeals to your audience, and create relevant posts with appropriate hashtags and links within minutes. It can schedule those points to go out at the most effective times for maximum engagement.
Artificial intelligence can go above and beyond regular audience settings. This means you'll be able to discover and target more high-quality prospects and leads.
Additionally, you can use AI to track your social media posts' performance to figure out what kind of content drives the best results for your business. These insights will allow you to consistently create content that your audience finds useful and engaging.
Tip: To scale (quality) content creation, I recommend leveraging content tech. For instance, I use Surfer SEO for on-page optimization, Grammarly Pro for proofreading, and several other tools.
Improving customer experience and service
People love doing business with brands that provide great customer service. However, customer satisfaction and retention begin with knowing your customers.
By incorporating artificial intelligence in social media, you'll be able to understand your audience's preferences and get closer to them.
This way, you can create content, target ads, and make changes to your products or services that enhance your users’ experiences. You can identify problem areas and fix them right away and respond to issues and complaints promptly to provide the best customer experience on social media.
Gathering insights through social listening
Artificial intelligence has helped incorporate tools such as social listening that can analyze social media posts at scale, listen to what people are saying about your brand, and help you discover emerging trends or new audiences to target.
People might be using your products and services in ways that you never intended. Knowing those use cases will open up new avenues for promotion for your brand.
The consumer insights that AI generates will help you build stronger connections with your audience, as well as improve brand reputation and equity.
Competitor analysis
If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you must monitor your competition to figure out how to outshine them.
AI-powered analytics can help you analyze your competitors' social profiles accurately and quickly. You can keep tabs on their reach, engagement rates, conversion rates, how their customers feel about them, and the strategies that are yielding results for them.
With this information, you'll be able to optimize your social strategy to boost engagement and increase conversions.
Social media advertising
Organic social media activities can only get you so far. This is where paid advertising comes in. Many social media platforms have built-in advertising systems that brands can use to enhance the results of their marketing operations.
You no longer have to struggle to come up with compelling captions, calls to action, and images for your ads when AI tools can do this work for you. These technologies can create Facebook and Instagram ads that are optimized for clicks and conversions.
AI can also analyze the performance of your ads and make recommendations to fuel the effectiveness of your campaigns and drive better results.
Top 3 artificial intelligence trends in social media marketing
AI is constantly breaking new ground in the field of social media management. New technologies are being introduced to streamline various aspects of social marketing operations. There have been some noticeable trends in how AI is used in social media, and they tend to revolve around the following areas:
1. Mobile testing and optimization
Thanks to artificial intelligence, you can create specific campaigns targeted at users based on what type of device they use. For instance, someone using a mobile device to browse for products and services will have less screen space but might be more motivated to purchase. Once your AI tool detects that this prospect is a mobile user, it'll show them a mobile-friendly ad that compels them to take the next step.
2. Content testing and optimization
AI-powered technologies have helped companies dramatically increase conversions by targeting audiences with specific, relevant digital copy, and engaging visuals. This means marketers can now customize social media marketing messages on an individual level based on the user's historical preferences and behaviors.
3. Behavioral data pattern recognition
This AI in social media trend is focused on improving customization and targeting by using data from past customer journeys to forecast future outcomes and create automated marketing content/workflows.
The impact of artificial intelligence on social media
The impact of artificial intelligence on social media has been enormous. It's what enables us to upload pictures and texts on our favorite platforms or automatically translate posts in different languages to English.
Facebook uses a tool called DeepText to automatically detect bad content – nudity, hate speech, threats, fake profiles, and spam – shared on the platform and remove them.
AI enables Instagram to process content generated by its one billion users, a feat that would be impossible to do manually. AI determines what posts get on your Instagram feed, stories, and Explore page based on the content you like and accounts you follow.
Like its counterparts, Twitter also uses AI to process copious amounts of data and root out fraud, propaganda, and hateful comments. AI learns from users' actions and makes tweets and account recommendations to them that they're likely to find interesting.
LinkedIn uses the Bright algorithm to analyze hiring patterns, work experiences, location, and other data to better match candidates with potential employers.
5 benefits of AI for social media
These are just some instances of how artificial intelligence in social media enhances the user experience and overall effectiveness of social platforms. However, you don't need to be a social media company to enjoy the many benefits that AI can offer your marketing operations, such as:
1. Increased audience engagement
Artificial intelligence enables businesses to get to know their audience a lot better and understand their preferences. This way, they'll be equipped to create content that captures their attention and interest and compels them to take the desired action.
2. Greater efficiency
By relinquishing cumbersome and mundane tasks to AI, marketers can streamline their processes to perform more efficiently. You'll save time and energy, which can be poured into tasks that require human effort for execution.
3. Smarter advertising
With AI on your side, you no longer have to waste your marketing budget on ads that don't work. You can target prospects and customers with the right message at the right time and get them to convert easily.
4. Refined content targeting
Using AI to track your audience's behaviors and preferences on social media will give you a clear understanding of how to appeal to them by creating content that they'll want to engage with and share with others.
5. Reduced marketing costs with better ROI
Artificial intelligence is capable of fully or partially automating time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks that overwhelm your team. As a result, your marketing operations will require less manpower, and you'll be to properly utilize your ad budget. Thanks to the data-driven predictions and decisions that you make, your campaigns are bound to generate impressive results that contribute to revenue growth.
Examples of how popular platforms use AI in social media
When it comes to artificial intelligence in social media, the sky's the limit. If you can imagine a task that you want to accomplish, you can find or build an AI tool to help you get it done.
If you're wondering just how far AI can take you or looking for inspiration on how to incorporate it into your social strategy, here are some of the ways major organizations currently use AI:
Pinterest meets AI
Over 80% of Pinterest's 300 million active users make purchases via the platform because of the hyper-personalized content that Pinterest offers.
Which comes to no surprise, as hyper-personalization is the future of marketing. The platform is able to achieve such high levels of conversions because of its deep learning algorithm that displays comprehensive results for every search that a user makes.
PinterestLens is a tool that allows Pinterest users to take pictures and use them to search for related items rather than entering keywords. The tool will analyze every aspect of the captured image and deliver results that match.
For marketers, the Socialbakers also offers an AI image recognition software that allows you to identify trends, logos, or objects in millions of social media posts.
Instagram and AI social monitoring
When the story broke that teenagers were constantly being bullied on Instagram, the platform took a proactive approach to resolve the issue.
They created a smart algorithm that identifies and removes any posts or messages that contravene Instagram's community guidelines.
This action improved their customer satisfaction rates and enhanced the platform's experience for users.
The takeaway
Artificial intelligence in the social media market is expected to grow to over $2.1 billion by 2023.
More and more businesses rely on AI to handle various aspects of their day-to-day operations, including activities on their social media marketing platforms.
If your company is serious about using social media to connect with customers, generate leads, and promote your brand, AI can power your strategy, take it to the next level, and give you a competitive edge in your industry.
You can use the unparalleled insights that these technologies provide to increase productivity, identify new trends, reach a wider audience, figure out what works for your niche, track your performance, and optimize your campaigns in real-time.To get started with the top AI-powered social media marketing platform, contact us today!
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
