In the modern business world, automation is a big part of long-term success and growth. There are many things you can automate at least in part, and artificial intelligence can help you do that efficiently and effectively.
When it comes to social media, you probably know that it’s important for marketing, sales, and support, but you might not have known that you can use conversational AI on social media to skyrocket your strategy as a whole. For example, you’ve heard that AI can help manage, post, and save time for social media content creators. Today, we’re narrowing in on conversational AI on social media, its application in social and communication channels, and how you can use it to achieve your goals.
Here’s everything you need to know.
What is Conversational AI Exactly?
Conversational AI is artificial intelligence technology commonly used to enable communication between customers and machines. A conversational AI is a virtual assistant or a chatbot that can talk to people by leveraging machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to learn, improve, and deliver a genuine conversational experience.
There are many variables that you need to consider when you’re thinking about integrating conversational AI into your social strategy, such as when to use AI voices or how best to optimize your chatbot for your and the customers’ goals. Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that in a bit.
For now, let’s take a look at how conversational AI works and the systems that make it so effective.
How Does Conversational AI Work?
Conversational AI works through two primary functions:
- Machine Learning
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Machine Learning is a vast and complex field, but put simply and in the context of our story today, it is a technology that allows the AI to learn and adapt over time. It does this by analyzing communication patterns, customer behavior and interactions, and by sifting through data in general, including the h vast amounts of data you may have harvested from your social media channels.
But that doesn’t mean that it does it on its own. Machine Learning is very much supported by machine learning experts, but sometimes it can be independent.
You can use Machine Learning as a part of a dedicated tool like a Whatsapp chatbot or any other chatbot on your social channels. Integrating these chatbots is nowadays easy with out-of-the-box solutions.
Natural Language Processing, on the other hand, is an AI process in which it learns to understand language. When the AI system maps out the language patterns and wording, it can move on to natural language generation, which is the actual process of communicating with humans on its own.
Combined, Machine Learning and NLP allow your chatbot to interact with your customers in an intelligent and natural way, constantly learning from past experiences and optimizing its communication.
Now that you know how conversational AI works, here’s why you need it in your social media and communication strategies.
5 Benefits of Conversational AI for Your Social Strategy
Needless to say, there are many wonderful things you can achieve with this technology, simply by integrating it into your social channels. Here are some of the most notable benefits to inspire you to invest in conversational AI.
Personalize the Customer’s Experience
Right off the bat, it’s important to recognize the need for personalization whether you’re selling products or services, and regardless if you’re in the B2C or the B2B field. Personalization is a key part of stellar customer experience and it can greatly influence the decision-making process of your customers.
Some of the best social media optimization tips include personalization across the board, including the way you communicate with your audience. An AI-driven chatbot can help personalize not only the way it communicates, but also the way it recommends products, services, and complementary materials like freebies and downloadable content.
The AI does this by analyzing the behavioral data of the individual to deliver tailored offers, content, and experiences.
Save Time and Other Resources
One of the more obvious benefits of conversational AI is that it allows you to save time, money, and human-power. Because chatbot technology is mostly automated, you’re able to save a lot of time you would have otherwise spent on managing communication with customers manually, as well as handling customer support tickets, sales opportunities, and more.
Because voice and language-driven intelligence is one of the biggest AI trends right now, you can leverage your AI chatbot to communicate with your social audience 24/7, and to do it efficiently and effectively. This allows your marketers, sales experts, and support agents to focus on complex tasks and automate the repetitive ones.
Most importantly for your customers, it cuts waiting times. Your followers and customers are able to get in touch with you immediately via chatbot, instead of having to wait around for a human agent to get back to them. This improves sales opportunities, support, and marketing effectiveness considerably.
Improve Accessibility and Availability
Availability ties directly into the previous benefit, because you can’t ensure the constant availability of your support, sales, or social marketing staff members without incurring some serious financial expenditure. It costs a lot to run support teams that are constantly available to your social audience, especially if you’re a global business communicating with customers from around the world.
You might not be in their time zone and you might not have the human power available, but your chatbot is always online, ready to assume control of the conversation. Conversational AI can go a long way in your reputation management strategy, and can help you retain a reputation as a brand that’s always available to its customers.
In a competitive online world, it pays to be available at all times, which leads us to another important perk.
Sell Even when You’re Offline
When you’re constantly available, you’re constantly selling. Brands that go offline at a certain time of day invariably lose out on conversion opportunities. This is especially true for Ecommerce brands that are trying to sell to a global customer base, or are at least trying to expand into different time zones.
You want to be available at all times to help your customers decide to buy. An AI-driven chatbot will open up many cross-sell and upsell opportunities, even when the rest of your staff is offline. This gives you an invaluable opportunity to generate sales 24 hours a day.
Eliminate Language Barriers
You might have not thought about it before, but conversational AI doesn’t come in English. Sure, English is the most used language pack and many chatbot solutions are built for the English language, but it’s important to note that these solutions come with translation software.
This is an invaluable perk, as it allows you to eliminate language barriers and sell to a global audience in their native language. That’s one of the reasons why social media integration is important if you have your own app, as you also want to integrate a chatbot that can engage with your users in multiple languages.
When someone reaches out, they can reach out in their own language, further improving the chance of conversion.
Conversational AI Best Practices You Should Use
You know the benefits, you understand how it works, now’s the time to start implementing the best practices that will help you make the most out of your social media AI technology.
Here’s what you need to keep in mind when integrating chatbots into your social and communication channels.
Complement AI with Human Expertise
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that conversational AI is a complementary tool to all your online efforts – not a standalone solution. And when it comes to social media, your job is to empower and enable your sales, marketing, and support teams to achieve better results using AI technology and chatbots, but not to use conversational AI as a set-it-and-forget-it tool.
What this means is that your chatbot is great for handling simple and repetitive tasks, and opening up sales opportunities for your human staff. You can also minimize the glaring difference between human and synthetic voice through by simply using a commercial voice-over for social media instead of generating a synthetic voice that will always sound less natural than the human counterpart.
In turn, this will make the whole conversation more natural to the customer, and it will make the transition from a chatbot to a human support agent seamless and straightforward.
Optimize the AI for Social Commerce
Social selling can be one of your most powerful sales strategies, if implemented correctly and if you let conversational AI lend a helping hand. In fact, chatbots can improve your conversion opportunities, customer acquisition and repeat sales if you optimize your AI for social selling.
ALong with other automated efforts such as retargeting ads that will appear in front of the right audience at the right time, a chatbot can directly engage with the customer to offer tailored solutions. Optimized chatbots can recommend complementary products or upgraded SaaS solutions to increase the shopping cart value of each new or repeat customer.
Likewise, your AI chatbot can capitalize on upsell opportunities, inspiring customers to upgrade to a better subscription plan, choose a better product for a small price increase, and more. To capitalize on social commerce, make sure your AI is able to place orders directly throughout your inventory management systems, log orders and shipping information, and automatically integrate with your entire Ecommerce solution.
Use AI to Build Brand Loyalty
You can use conversational AI to sell on social media, yes, but there are many other uses to this technology, such as building brand loyalty with your online audience. For one, you need to optimize your social profiles, post regularly, and engage with your audience in the comments.
There’s a lot that goes into leading a successful LinkedIn profile or any other social media profile like Instagram or Facebook, but conversational AI can definitely help you optimize your communication. For one, you can use your chatbot to reach out to your followers automatically with special offers and messaging.
A chatbot doesn’t need to reach out to sell something, it can simply reach out with a heartfelt message acknowledging the individual. It can then include a call to action such as to tag you in their posts, tell the online community about their experience with your brand, and the like.
Optimize for User Intent
Different customers will try to engage with your brand for different reasons, as not everyone is at the same stage of the buyer’s journey. If a customer is trying to learn something and your chatbot greets them with a sales-oriented message, for example, you risk losing the lead for good.
With that in mind, you can use sentiment analysis to empower your AI and help it craft the right messages and adapt its communication to different customers. Some customers are reaching out to learn, others to compare their options, and some are ready to buy – make sure that your chatbot communicates with every group the right way.
Test and Iterate Regularly
On a final note, remember that you need to keep an eye on your chatbots and conversational AI in general to monitor their performance, test, and continuously optimize over time. Conversational AI can be very autonomous if the system is built for minimal oversight from the group up, but that doesn’t mean that the tool will automatically deliver the best possible results for your brand and its unique needs.
Every industry, and niche has an audience with unique sensibilities and a distinct way of engaging with their favorite brands. Your chatbot needs to know whether it should communicate in a serious and professional manner, or if it should portray a whimsical, new-age brand voice.
This is the kind of fine tuning that you will need to do as the machine learning system continues to collect user data and learn about your customers. Test and optimize regularly, and your AI system will be able to take over your social media communication with relative ease.
Over to You
Conversational AI should be a key part of your social media strategy in 2022 and beyond. There are many objectives you can work towards with the help of AI and machine learning systems. Simply having chatbots to help you communicate, sell, and market your products and services is a great way to cut operational expenses, boost productivity and efficiency, and improve cross and up-sell opportunities on these channels.
Make sure to use these tips and best practices to integrate conversational AI into your social media efforts and communication channels to take your brand forward.