From ChatGPT to deep fakes–artificial intelligence has been making waves in the digital landscape. Though sometimes controversial, the use of AI is only going to grow more popular as technology evolves. For brands and marketers, this can prove to be a boon especially if you know how to leverage it the right way. In fact, it can even be an effective tool to support your social media efforts.
In this post, we take a closer look at AI and social media and explore how the technology can be used by brands on social media. This will help you understand its value for your business and allow you to get the most out of it. Let’s dive in.
AI and Social Media: Understanding How AI Can Help Your Social Media Efforts:
What is AI for Social Media?
Artificial intelligence refers to a simulation of human thought patterns in machines so that they can perform complex, human-like tasks. This may involve anything from making purchase recommendations to providing support to customers. In the social media context, AI is used for managing customer interactions, content creation, and optimizing social media ads for improved return on investment.
Now that the use of AI for social media has become almost a norm than an option, brands that are not leveraging it could be falling behind the competition. It could significantly help you save time, improve customer engagement, and reduce your costs when it comes to social media management.
The Benefits of Using AI in Social Media
To continue with the above, AI and social media can work together like eggs and bacon. As long as you know the right way to leverage it, here are some of the main benefits that you can enjoy from using AI in your social media efforts.
Increased Efficiency
One of the first jobs of AI technology is to perform tasks as quickly and as effectively as possible. That’s why using AI for social media is the perfect way to instantly improve your overall efficiency. You’ll be able to automate certain tasks such as content creation and curation so your team can focus on things that need human attention.
Reduced Cost
The increasing use of automation also means that you won’t have to spend as much on certain aspects of your social media management. For starters, you can set up automated chatbots to respond to your customers during out-of-office hours. That way, you don’t have to set up a 24/7 customer support team, which can cost a lot of money.
For example, Sprout Social uses a chatbot to cater to their customers’ support needs on Twitter. People can easily initiate conversations and choose from various options to find the right kind of help.
Source: Sprout Social
Improved Customer Engagement
In line with the above, using AI to manage your social media interactions is a great way to ensure that you’re responding to your customers on time. Whether they have questions or they need help with something, an AI chatbot is perfect for delivering the kind of responsiveness your customers expect. Meanwhile, your social media team can focus on providing quality responses for conversations that are a bit more complex for a chatbot to handle.
Moreover, there are AI tools that will help you to discover better ways to engage your audience. For example, you can discover which headlines or media options would result in the most engagement.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
As a result of your responsiveness, you can also expect your social media customer satisfaction to soar. You’re showing your audience that you’re there to help and you’re providing them with fast solutions/answers to the problems they’re facing. This would naturally contribute to satisfied customers who would eventually make repeat purchases.
Increased Revenue
Another way that artificial intelligence can help with your social media efforts is by identifying opportunities to boost your revenue. The right AI tools can discover new audience segments to tap into and predict trends through conversational analytics. You can also use AI to make predictions about which audiences are more likely to take action and spend more money. These insights will help you fine-tune your ad targeting and reach them with personalized messaging.
5 Business Use Cases of AI in Social Media
At this point, the value that AI can bring to the equation is already apparent. However, you might still be unsure about exactly how your business can leverage AI for social media. Let’s take a look at the following business use cases of AI in social media to give you some inspiration.
1. Optimize Your Content Creation
One of the biggest challenges that brands face with social media is creating high-quality content consistently. Most social media algorithms tend to favor posts that come from accounts that publish content regularly. This means you have to make sure you’re regularly pushing out content so you can gain visibility in relevant feeds and discovery pages.
What makes this even more challenging is that not just any content would do. You need content that’s high-quality both in terms of presentation and the value it offers. As such, brands may lack the resources to maintain a solid social media content strategy and eventually ignore content production altogether. Either that or they’ll make sacrifices in terms of content quality or consistency.
Fortunately, you can now turn to AI to help you with this. Tools like Copy.ai helps you generate text content for social media so you can beat the stress of coming up with new ideas every time. You just need to choose which platform you want to create content for, what points you want to cover, and what tone you want to use. And the tool will automatically produce the content for you.
Source: copy.ai
You can further optimize your social media creatives with the help of tools like AdCreative.ai. This tool automatically creates social media graphics and images based on data so you can generate high levels of engagement. The algorithm makes design decisions informed by the top-performing social media posts and produces creatives that not only look great but can effectively engage your audience.
2. Personalize the Customer Experience
In line with the above, AI can also help you to deliver content that’s more tailored to the needs and interests of your audience. This will help you to create a more personalized experience for people interacting with your brand on social media.
AI-powered social listening tools will keep track of customer conversations across social media and make accurate predictions about upcoming trends. Moreover, these tools will also give you an idea of your target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. This will allow you to tailor your content to address them so you can add more value to your audience.
AI chatbots also help to further personalize the experience with conversations tailored to the unique needs of each user. From personalized greetings to pulling up customer and order info–these chatbots can be integrated with your CRM and data systems to personalize each interaction.
With the combination of tailored content and personalized interactions, you can significantly enhance people’s experience when interacting with your brand. For potential customers, this means an increased likelihood to go through with their purchase since they’re getting the kind of information and help they need. For existing customers, this could potentially lead to repeat purchases as they may feel more inclined to come back.
3. Improve Your Responsiveness
With more and more people using social media, it has also become a norm for customers to use social media as a channel to get support. In fact, McKinsey reports that 81% of consumers won’t recommend a brand at all to their friends if they reached out for support on social media and didn’t get any response. Moreover, customers tend to spend 20-40% more on brands that respond to their social media customer service requests.
And it’s not just any kind of support that these consumers are looking for; they’re expecting fast responses from brands. According to McKinsey, 40% of consumers expect a response within the first hour. This is where chatbots come in, giving you the ability to quickly respond to your customers even if your representatives aren’t currently available.
You can set up AI-powered chatbots to respond to customers seeking support through your social media accounts. These chatbots can be the initial point of contact, providing instant responses to commonly asked questions. Alternatively, the chatbots can also direct customers to the right department by asking them an initial round of questions to understand their needs.
For example, VEJA has a chatbot on Facebook that provides customers with an option to initiate a conversation depending on their concerns. This not only allows for instant responses but also makes it easier for customers to reach the department they need.
Source: facebook.com
4. Optimize Your Ads
With a decline in organic visibility, brands are increasingly turning to paid advertising to reach the right audience on social media. Unfortunately, many brands also struggle to get the most out of their advertising investment. As a result, they lose their precious resources and marketing dollars on ads that don’t really deliver.
The good news is that there are AI tools that can address this challenge in several ways. First of all, AI can help you determine which social media users are most likely to buy from your brand. You can then deliver highly relevant ads to them using the social media platforms they use the most. This means you can effectively improve your targeting by identifying the best possible interests and keywords.
Another popular use of AI is in writing social media ads. You can find AI tools that will make recommendations on the languages and messaging that will deliver the biggest impact. This can then be used to craft powerful ads that get people to click and make a purchase.
For instance, Phrasee is an AI platform that uses natural language processing to create on-brand marketing messages for social media and beyond. It comes with dynamic optimization features that will let you optimize your messaging in real time so that your social media ads generate better results. Phrasee even monitors the performance of your campaigns to determine the type of language that works best with your audience.
Source: phrasee.co
5. Moderate Comments More Effectively
Social media isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, and you’ll experience your fair share of abusive and hateful comments that can dampen the user experience. Moreover, there’s an abundance of bots that leave spam comments or try to scam your followers. This can be particularly detrimental to brands since the goal is to build a social media community that’s wholesome and engaged. That’s why you have to closely monitor your comments section and quickly remove anything that could negatively affect people’s experience.
The problem is that this can be extremely time-consuming. You may be able to set up alerts and get notified of any new comments on your social media posts. But if those bots and malicious accounts strike while your team’s not in the office, there’s a chance many users’ experiences will be ruined by the time you get to deal with the comments.
Now AI tools can make this easier with automated comment moderation capabilities, so you don’t always need to have a team manually monitoring and deleting abusive or spammy comments. For instance, the Smart Moderation app monitors your comments section in real time and automatically filters those containing profanity, abusive language, and illegal words the minute they’re posted. The same goes for spam comments and comments that come from trolls so your followers can have peace of mind when engaging with your posts.
Get the Most Out of AI for Social Media
When used the right way in all the right places, artificial intelligence can make your job much easier. In addition to improving your efficiency, it can also help you optimize your efforts and get the most out of your social media strategy. Use the above points as inspiration to start implementing AI into your social media efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the advantage of AI in social media?
AI can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your social media efforts. It helps you save time, cut costs, deliver better content, improve responsiveness, and drive increased revenue.
How is AI used in social media?
AI can be used in social media for content creation, automating responses, optimizing ads, and moderating comments.
Can you use AI to write social media posts?
Yes, there are AI tools that will write your social media posts for you.
What is the future of AI in social media?
As technology evolves, the use of AI in social media will only grow in popularity. New tools will come up to assist with various aspects of the social media landscape, making it easier for brands to generate a bigger impact at a lesser cost.
How will AI change social media?
AI will help to create more personalized and enhanced experiences on social media–from delivering content that’s tailored to their needs to providing timely and relevant responses.
