Managing your social media can feel like a never-ending battle because it is constantly changing. So, it is no surprise that AI in marketing automation is a hot topic.
It is redefining how you can create more effective marketing strategies in less time. But more than that, it is changing the way you can engage with audiences.
In this article, we will explore social media transformation and how AI is reshaping social media and making its mark. By the end, you will know how to use AI to boost your social media efforts and make your brand stand out.
9 Ways AI In Marketing Automation Is Transforming Social Media
Do you want to automate marketing tasks and stay competitive on social media? Uncover 9 ways your marketing teams can use AI. Also, check out practical examples of how you can make it work for your company’s social media.
1. Curate Dynamic Content
Use AI-powered tools to pick and present content that matches your target audience’s interests. Giving them what they love to see, read, or watch transforms how they interact with your brand. Instead of one-size-fits-all posts, deliver fresh, trending content that interests them.
To get started, lean on machine learning algorithms that analyze user behavior, preferences, and engagement. For instance, Curata can:
- Browse hundreds of sources.
- Automatically adapt to your preferences.
- Uncover what’s currently being discussed on social media.
Another great example is Bulk.ly’s content curation features. You can import content from your RSS feeds to get status updates in minutes. With this, you can curate content automatically and streamline your social media publishing.
For example, let’s say you run a fitness brand and AI notices a spike in interest around home workouts among your followers. It can curate and suggest social media posts about home workout tactics and home training equipment.
This tailored approach guarantees your content taps into what your target audience is currently looking for.
2. Detect Fake & Spam Accounts
Fake and spam accounts can mess with your online presence. They will inflate your follower numbers but will not engage genuinely. This will mislead your marketing team and skew your data.
Plus, they damage customer experience and deter users with irrelevant or repetitive comments on your accounts. Here’s where artificial intelligence comes into play. It analyzes data and identifies patterns typical of fake, fraudulent, or spammy behavior.
Here are the social media sites to focus on:
Tools like ZeroFOX have AI algorithms that sift through your followers and interactions to identify these threats. You can guarantee that your marketing efforts are targeted correctly when you weed out these fakes. Additionally, your customers will be engaging with authentic accounts.
3. Discover Influencers
We live in a world where influencers run social media. The right influencer can make your marketing strategy a success, while the wrong one can give you a PR disaster.
But with artificial intelligence, the risks of getting a mismatch become lower. AI can browse multiple channels to give you a list of influencers to collaborate with and who match your branding.
How do you do this?
Use AI marketing automation tools like HypeAuditor. Here’s an example if you type a keyword relevant to your niche in the platform:
It will analyze engagement rates, content relevance, and audience demographics to suggest influencers who can amplify your marketing campaigns. Its AI will make sure they have an engaged audience that overlaps with your target demographic.
4. Identify User Sentiment
Looking at what people are saying about your brand helps you gauge your audience’s mood. AI can check social media data, identify patterns, and analyze sentiments at scale. It will quickly understand what your audience loves and dislikes.
Your human marketers will not have to manually check each post for hours. More importantly, it removes the guesswork since AI is data-backed.
How do you utilize this to improve your social media presence?
Let’s say your eCommerce business sells outdoor apparel. Use Keyhole to discover how your audience feels about your new line of eco-friendly hiking gear.
If the sentiment is positive, you can double down on eco-friendly products. In contrast, if the feedback reveals concerns, you should investigate and address these issues. This lets you adjust your marketing communications efforts to align with customer expectations and preferences.
Moreover, this lets you improve customer engagement and retain your audience’s interest.
5. Integrate Chatbots On Social Media Platforms
Consider these AI chatbots as your round-the-clock assistant. They help guide the customer journey with their instant responses. Additionally, they give personalized recommendations based on the customer’s historical data.
AI-powered chatbots also excel in lead generation as they can collect user information and guide customers through the sales funnel. Connect them to your CRM and use the data to tailor your marketing efforts.
Here’s how H&M’s bot does it:
To integrate chatbots into your social media, you can either:
- Choose BotStar to create your own based on your needs.
- Pick a tool like Chatfuel to have ready-made bot templates.
But of course, a chatbot isn’t only for trendy brands with many followers. Small businesses or mom-and-pop shops can also integrate chatbots into their social media accounts.
For instance, let’s say you have an Instagram account for your pet store. You can integrate a chatbot that can:
- Get customer feedback.
- Instantly answer questions about pet supplies.
- Recommend products specifically for a pet’s breed or age.
- Assist in tracking orders for items like customized collars or specialty foods.
So, your human customer service agents can focus on more serious customer inquiries.
6. Predict Customer Behavior
AI can harness predictive analytics and analyze data for predicting customer behavior. This technology looks for:
- What they discuss.
- Patterns in how users interact with content.
- How they respond to various marketing channels.
Additionally, these are the most popular ways companies use predictive analytics:
With this, you can do targeted marketing and adjust strategies proactively.
Here’s how you can employ this for your brand:
Let’s say you have a clothing brand. Use AI to analyze social media interactions and buying trends. You can have AI examine likes, comments, and shares related to summer wear and purchase data during warmer months.
So what if AI predicts a surge in interest in lightweight fabrics and vibrant colors?
Adjust your inventory and marketing efforts ahead of the summer season to guarantee you meet customer demands. With predictive analytics, you can boost sales and customer satisfaction.
7. Streamline Content Creation
For many, the highlight of using AI is helping teams automate repetitive marketing tasks. This includes generating content for multiple platforms with minimal human involvement.
AI marketing tools, like ChatGPT and Jasper, use natural language processing. They can produce relevant content within seconds while sounding human-like. This saves you a lot of time to focus on other parts of the content strategy.
For instance, let’s say you’re running a job board and you want to advertise on social media. Use ChatGPT to craft posts that highlight your available graduate programs in Australia.
A sample prompt could be:
Generate a concise, engaging post for Instagram and LinkedIn highlighting the new post-graduate program. Here are the details [fields of study, application deadlines, and eligibility criteria].
And yes, AI content ideation and creation also work well in B2B and highly technical, regulated industries.
For example, if you were offering a purely B2B quality management software for manufacturing, the following prompt will reveal hundreds of unique and standout topic ideas for your social media campaign:
List 25 engaging LinkedIn topic ideas for AlisQI, a Quality Management Software for manufacturing. Focus on quality management importance, efficiency, and digital transformation. Target industry professionals and highlight AlisQI’s solutions to industry challenges.
8. Convert Text-To-Speech
AI can make your social media content more accessible and engaging. Tools like Murf.ai turn written content into lifelike audio.
You can boost your digital marketing campaigns with voiceovers that capture your marketing messages’ essence with emotion and clarity. Plus, this helps you reach those visually impaired audiences.
For example, let’s say you have a WordPress chat plugin. Use AI to craft captivating voiceovers for your social media videos. You can speak about its features like:
- Custom channels addition.
- Customizable popup design.
- Inclusion of contact forms for lead generation.
- Scheduling when to only show the messaging widget to their customers.
- Integration with multiple apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
With this approach, you present a dynamic alternative to plain old text and bring your plugin’s benefits to life. This will pique your prospects’ interest rather than having them read paragraphs. Plus, you can do this in minutes instead of hours and paying voice actors.
9. Automate A/B Testing For Content
To post the best content that resonates, A/B testing lets you compare 2 versions and see which performs better. Manually doing this takes time, but AI tools like Optimizely automate the process.
They can test different types of content and give you marketing analytics to help you make better choices.
AI-powered A/B testing is equally effective for large companies with massive audiences as it is for small traditional service-based businesses, like a window cleaning service, for example:
Run an automated A/B test on Facebook with different content types, images, and hooks to see which one gives you the most engagement.
With real-time feedback, you can quickly adjust your strategy. Plus, you can make sure you’re focusing on content that converts and meets your audience’s preferences.
Knowing how to boost your social media efforts with AI is just the beginning. Challenges may come your way, so let’s explore what those are and how to deal with them.
6 Challenges To Look Out For When Dealing With AI
In this section, we’ll explore 6 challenges in AI-powered marketing processes so you’re not caught off guard. Look out for actionable insights to tackle them effectively.
A. Lack Of Human Touch
Using e ChatGPT and Jasper can make your conversations robotic and feel impersonal. It will lack the authenticity that comes from human engagement. When your audiences feel disconnected, it can reduce engagement and affect your brand perception.
How do you solve this?
Blend your AI-drive strategies with human oversight. Leverage AI for efficiency but make sure real people review and monitor conversations. Encourage them to add personal touches or responses when necessary.
Also, use conversational marketing to make chats personalized and flexible, not just scripted. You should also train your AI to talk as humans would and to recognize when to escalate a query to a human agent.
This helps guarantee that sensitive issues are handled with empathy and understanding. Doing this lets you maintain a personal connection with your audience.
B. Accuracy
AI’s effectiveness in providing actionable data depends on the data quality it analyzes. If the data is off, you run the risk of making decisions based on flawed analyses. This can misguide your strategies, resulting in:
- Less effective campaigns
- Misallocation of resources
AI can sometimes give outdated information. Simply copy-pasting AI content can damage your brand reputation, even if it is a harmless mistake.
This inaccuracy poses additional risks in regulated fields like manufacturing, where mistakes can mean legal disputes.
To tackle these issues, make sure you feed your marketing automation software with accurate data. You should also regularly audit and update your data sources to improve output quality.
Also, don’t take AI-produced written content as is. You and your team should research and fact-check the information. Review everything to catch any errors and nuances that AI may overlook.
C. Skills Gap
Many companies lack the in-house expertise to leverage AI-powered marketing automation tools. But they are confident they can fix this and move toward properly executing their AI strategies.
Skills gap hampers your social media efforts in several ways:
- It complicates customer data analysis.
- It makes integrating AI into existing marketing processes less efficient.
- It slows down the optimization of repetitive tasks, which defeats AI’s purpose.
Facing this challenge puts you at risk of misinterpreting data or relying on outdated info. This causes poor insights and potentially ruins your campaigns.
To bridge this gap, invest in your team’s development. Enroll them in courses or webinars so they learn:
- How to analyze data.
- Prompts to give AI to get the best results.
- The best AI tools and how to integrate them into social media tasks.
Hire those who are already AI experts to fill the gap. You can ask them to share their knowledge with your existing staff.
D. Over-Reliance On AI
Automating repetitive tasks and using AI to inform marketing strategies are standard practices. Providing customer service through AI has also become common. There is no doubt AI helps many businesses.
However, letting AI carry all the responsibilities will reduce your marketing efforts’ effectiveness. When AI solely handles customer service and content creation, it can miss the nuances of human emotion.
This over-reliance on AI causes missed opportunities for genuine engagement, making your social media efforts feel impersonal to followers.
How do you solve this?
Find a balance. While you implement AI to increase efficiency, make sure there is human oversight. Involve your team in strategizing, content creation, and reviewing AI-generated interactions regularly.
This way, you can combine the strengths of AI with the irreplaceable insights and empathy of human team members. With this, you can guarantee your social media content is always relatable.
E. High Costs
Leveraging AI comes with a high initial investment and ongoing expenses needed to maintain it. If you’re a small business, these costs can put you at a disadvantage. This will limit your access to advanced AI tools or features for social media management.
To solve this, use free or low-cost AI tools that offer basic functionalities. For example, Bulk.ly lets you automatically:
- Recycle posts.
- Upload content in bulk.
- Create hashtags for multiple platforms.
You can also explore partnerships with AI vendors for customized solutions to spread out costs. Additionally, prioritize investments in AI technologies that offer the highest ROI. As these AI techs make your teams more efficient over time, you can get significant cost savings.
You can also reinvest the gains into more advanced AI capabilities. With this, you can drive your social media efforts and keep up with competitors while achieving cost efficiency.
F. Technical Failures
When AI systems malfunction, it will disrupt your marketing operations. From automating responses to analyzing customer data, this affects your ability to engage with current and potential customers.
They expect timely and relevant interactions, and if they do not get it, they will be dissatisfied.
How do you deal with this?
Make sure you continuously update and secure your AI systems to prevent common failures. Most importantly, create a backup plan for manual intervention. Train your employees on how they should proceed when AI is down.
Final Thoughts on Social Media Transformation
AI in social media marketing opens up a world of possibilities for you. You can leverage AI marketing automation to improve customer engagement, streamline operations, and unlock deep insights into consumer behavior.
Take the actionable insights and apply them to your brand. However, AI is not a one-and-done thing. You need continuous evaluation and adaptation of your AI and social media strategies to stay ahead of the curve. Evolve along with the needs of your audience.
Are you ready to harness AI and integrate it into your social media efforts?
Explore how Bulk.ly’s AI power can boost your social media tasks. Create, organize, and publish your posts automatically and optimize your campaigns. Don’t wait up and start your free trial today.