Social media is more than a medium for staying connected to the world. Today, these channels are indispensable business tools.
And if you want to run a thriving business in a cluttered market, you must know how to reach a wider audience. With its current user base of over 4.59 billion, social media offers you a fast and inexpensive way to do that.
But you need innovation, consistency, and agility to build a strong brand presence. That’s where implementing AI in social media marketing will help you.
With businesses jumping onto the AI bandwagon for better efficiency, it has also become a popular and equally effective method to pace up your social media marketing. Reports expect the market of AI in social media to reach $2.2 billion by 2023.
AI speeds up internal processes, improves audience reach, and raises ROI. To help you do that and outshine your competitors, we’re discussing strategies to leverage AI for social media.
Understanding AI in Social Media
While AI implementation is popular across industries, many new businesses still struggle to understand how it works. Besides making business operations easier, running social media initiatives also becomes easier with AI.
For social media, the whole algorithm depends on AI technology. For example, when we use Instagram, we get page suggestions based on how we interact on the platform. It shows content we like and increases our engagement on social media.
These mediums also use AI to detect abusive content, messages, and comments. For example, Facebook uses deep texts to identify instances against the platform’s regulations.
Benefits of using AI in social media
Using AI in social media helps businesses optimize their efforts and reach their target audience faster. It lets digital marketers improve and maintain their social media performance by increasing user engagement and generating actionable insights.
Here are some benefits of using AI in social media:
Quicker decision making
AI-driven social media marketing offers better customer intelligence. Proper AI software helps you spot the right audience for specific marketing campaigns in social media. It drives a better understanding of the ideal customer and assists you in deciding quickly and accurately.
AI also analyzes data in real-time, enabling companies to get on board with market changes. This way, you can make faster and more effective changes in your strategy and stay ahead in the game.
Better content creation and distribution
Implementing AI in social media can optimize your content creation and distribution process. It can identify relevant trends and topics your audience frequently participates in. This way you can create sharable content, refine audience targeting and maximize reach.
Consistency is key in social media marketing. But coming up with fresh ideas regularly is the hardest part of the process. With AI, you can find engaging content ideas quickly. Moreover, you can detect and experiment with optimal times to post. To maintain a routine, AI integration also schedules content and maintains your digital presence.
Improved user experience
AI-powered algorithms can enhance UX by customizing browsing experiences.
With AI, you can make your chatbots more interactive and intuitive, enabling a better understanding of customer sentiment behind queries and complaints. This offers quick resolution to customer queries and improves satisfaction and engagement.
AI also empowers brands to categorize consumers better, leading to enhanced personalization. Customers get better recommendations, proper ad placements, and tailored customer service. Machine learning can detect even the smallest changes in customer preferences, put intricate attention to their needs, and sustain their loyalty. By storing customer data, AI also cuts down on the hassle of asking for the same information at every interaction, improving convenience.
Enhanced data security
Accurate marketing involves extensive customer data collection. Besides running successful campaigns, protecting consumer information is of paramount importance. You can run into several legal risks, costing a huge fortune. Moreover, if customer data gets compromised, you lose their trust and your business’s credibility.
Implementing AI in your social media marketing enables you to comply with current data regulations. Proper AI marketing tools offer end-to-end data security by scanning vast data sets and detecting potential cyber threats. This way, you minimize the risks of data breaches, protecting your company from legal complications.
Lesser marketing expenditure
Implementing AI in social media helps marketers foresee business outcomes, detect potential risks, and take active measures to avoid them. It also automates repetitive tasks like scheduling posts and replying to comments.
This reduces human efforts and helps you target resources correctly, making the marketing process more cost-effective.
Neal Taparia, the founder of Cribbage-Online, explains that AI can help with creative assets. “To be successful with social media, you need images that stand out. With advances in generative AI, you can create and experiment with unique photos in seconds to drive more engagement.”
Better ROI
AI frees up your marketing team’s time, helping them brainstorm fresh ideas for key content pillars and elevate your social media marketing strategy.
AI in social media also eliminates consistency errors, keeping a unified brand voice across all channels. This helps businesses reach a wider audience, driving more business and improving ROI.
8 Strategies To Leverage Ai In Social Media Marketing
Now that we know the benefits of AI in social media, let’s see how you can implement it in your digital marketing strategy:
Personalization
Social media marketing helps businesses establish strong and long-lasting relationships with audiences and customers. But for that, you need to personalize your media strategies according to the customer’s engagement patterns.
To keep your audience interested, you need to show them content they relate to — and for that; you need conclusive customer intelligence. AI and machine learning can help you gather behavioral data and create an accurate buyer persona. You can personalize their experience on your social media profiles and increase engagement.
For example, BuzzFeed, one of the most popular content sites, uses AI to personalize its quiz content on social media. While the brand isn’t replacing human creativity with machine learning technologies, it uses AI social media tools to deliver a more enriching and customized content experience to its audience.
Chatbots
You must offer exceptional customer service to build a positive reputation through social media marketing. AI chatbots can help you do that by providing automated customer support across all your social media channels.
Chatbots can also help you generate leads by detecting audience engagement on your social media content. These AI-powered tools can also gather customer data and elevate your personalization game on social media. Moreover, reports virtual state assistants can cut customer support service fees by 30%.
For example, HelloFresh uses a Facebook chatbot to make order processing more efficient. You can place, customize, and track your order easily by texting the brand on Facebook Messenger.
Content creation
Building a thriving social media presence for your brand requires a consistent flow of new content. This can be a time-consuming process and may require expensive resources.
AI can support your content creation process at every stage by generating ideas relevant to your target market. It can identify trends from different channels and notify you so that you can leverage current interests through social media content.
AI can also streamline your research by gathering and organizing data from various web sources. You can also find high-volume keywords in seconds. This can save your content team time and help them quickly create a long-term SEO strategy.
Automation
Manually managing different social media accounts for your brand can take hours and put a hectic workload on your team. Keeping a unified brand tone across all channels also takes time and effort.
With AI in social media and tools like Bulkly, you can reduce manual labor by scheduling posts and comment replies. You can optimize your reach by automatically posting at peak audience time with no added effort. This lets you create a steady queue of content to maintain post frequency.
With automatic responses via virtual assistants, you can also increase customer satisfaction while freeing up precious hours for your team.
Social listening
The audience will find your social media interesting when you keep up with the latest conversations. It increases your brand’s relevance and defines your digital presence. Tracking the latest social media conversation around your industry gives you insight into the target market’s expectations.
AI technology can help you monitor your target market’s social media activity via social listening features. You can gather data on your competitors and benchmark your performance.
Social listening also helps brands identify relevant trends and hop on the current conversation early on. This maintains the audience’s interest in your social media campaigns.
The mystery of Area 51 became a sensation through memes and social media conversations in 2019. In the screenshot above, we can see how Oreo used this trend for its marketing on Twitter.
Competitor analysis
Brands across industries are putting their best foot forward to elevate social media marketing. This has made it difficult for new brands to stand out.
You must understand your competitor’s performance to stay on top of your marketing game. Implementing AI in social media will let you conduct accurate competitor analysis with minimum resources and effort. It generates actionable insights and helps you learn from your rival brand’s successes and failures.
A report by Deloitte even states that two-thirds of early AI users believe technologies like machine learning, deep learning, and NLP are paramount to their business’ success.
Running campaigns
Creating and posting impactful and entertaining content is not enough to run successful social media campaigns. You must know the best placements for your targeted ads. Brands must also segment their audience properly and run tests to examine a campaign’s effectiveness.
With AI-powered tools, you can analyze thousands of different combinations of ad placements and budget variations in seconds. It will help you segment your audience properly to run targeted social media campaigns. A combination of AI and social media teams can design high-yielding tests and examine the viability of specific campaigns.
Influencer marketing
Influencers have become the catalyst brands use to reach new audiences and establish trust. Partnering with the right influencers can significantly propel your social media marketing efforts.
However, to reach your target audience, you must pitch to influencers who align with your brand message and create content in your niche. AI in social media can examine data like an influencer’s previous collaborations, follower base, and engagement and identify the most fitting ones for you to partner with. You can also use AI tools to detect fraudulent activity by filtering out fake likes, comments, and followers.
Once you collaborate, AI-powered tools can track the campaign’s progress and monitor the influencer’s performance. By measuring these aspects, you understand your influencer marketing impact and make improvements accordingly.
Pair AI with AR
From movies to interactive games, augmented reality has continued to grow and penetrate our everyday lives. Reports project the global AR market to grow from USD 6.12 billion in 2021 to USD 97.76 billion in 2028.
While many brands have infused AR in their website’s UX, it can elevate your social media game too. Blending AR with AI-driven social media campaigns enables an immersive experience for your audience and increases marketing ROI.
Online shoppers are often skeptical about products because they need more sensory experience. Virtual try-on feature integrated into marketing channels delivers detailed product information. This lets visitors make informed decisions and shop more from your brand.
Businesses are running shoppable social media ads to boost accessibility and engagement. AI will make the campaigns more targeted, while AR features will drive more ad engagement, improve conversions, and minimize returns.
Final Thoughts on Social Media with AI
AI can revolutionize social media marketing with the right approach and efficient tools. It can eliminate repetitive tasks, resolve customer queries in real time, and help you focus your resources on the right audience.
However, you must have clear goals and objectives before incorporating AI into social media marketing. Analyze your competitors frequently to see what works. The ultimate goal is to provide a superb customer experience. Using AI tools in combination with customer experience management software is the key to a holistic approach to optimizing the customer experience.
AI in social media involves huge customer data sets, posing legal risks in case of cyber-attacks and breaches. So, ensure your chosen AI platforms have security regulations to maintain compliance.
Lastly, train your team to use AI content creation tools while maintaining their creative flair.