By Val Razo
Social media and AI are a perfect match!
You know that every social media platform uses AI in one way or another: AI suggests accounts we might like, dictates content to surface in our feeds, moderates comments, you name it.
Long story short, AI improves our social media experience.
That’s great, but what can a social media marketer do with AI’s growing popularity and power? The technology makes it more challenging to develop social media strategies, given that now you have to guess which content will please both your audience and AI algorithms.
Solution?
If you can’t beat them, join them.
It’s the age of AI, and our job as social media marketers is to make it work to our advantage. While most marketers continue using artificial intelligence for content creation, 39% have broken a code and scaled their social media strategies with AI tools.
Wanna join them?
Read on to reveal the benefits of using AI in social media and how to implement AI technology in your social media strategy to drive business value.
What is AI for social media?
First, the basics:
What is AI, after all?
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis nailed it, defining AI as the “science of making machines smart.” We teach them to see, speak, and write like humans: AI recreates human thought patterns, i.e., mimics human intelligence.
Today, AI tech uses data to predict accurate and relevant details, from consumer trends to content formats resonating most with your target audience.
AI detects visual content and faces using image recognition. It uses sentiment analysis to mimic the desired tone of voice. It predicts performance and can recommend actions.
And the best part:
You can use all these capabilities to boost your social media strategy and marketing campaigns.
Why use AI in social media: benefits
Your fellow social media marketers use AI to scale strategies, reduce costs by automating tedious tasks or low-level management work, and produce data-driven content assets.
How’s that?
Below are all the benefits of AI tools in social media revealed.
- Reduce Costs
Automate content creation with AI tools – and you’ll save money on manual social media marketing activities. AI can help you generate ideas for new content assets faster, scale content creation, and automate repurposing (reformatting) content for various social media channels.
- Analyze Trends
Today’s AI makes accurate predictions, and marketers use it to estimate the likelihood of a particular content piece engaging the target audience and going viral. Backed by historical performance data and analyzing social media trends, AI shares analytics and insights you can use to predict your social media campaign’s performance and improve it if necessary.
- Understand the Audience
AI is your helpful hand in performing sentiment analysis to conduct customer research and better understand your target audience. Sentimental analysis allows you to determine what people feel about your product or service and adjust the marketing strategy accordingly.
Consider AI-based social media listening tools to see user comments and overall impressions of your brand. Moreover, AI will help you translate that data into insights about your customers’ needs.
Armed with this info, you’ll enhance personalization and deliver more meaningful experiences with your social media content.
- Increase Revenue
AI learns from data and can use the data from your social media audience to accelerate revenue. Get benefits from AI programming advertising:
Discover new audiences, predict who’ll get engaged, and target them with corresponding social messages and ads.
Create better copy and visuals for your social media ads to engage more customers. Use AI tools to manage your bidding systems.
Improve customer service and selling options with AI chatbots on social media channels. Individual approach and emotional connection in DMs are your chance to influence buying decisions.
- Save time
AI tools can automate humdrum tasks like content ideas generation, captions writing, and social media post scheduling.
Ask AI assistants to help with content planning. Let them create posts, navigate hashtags, and automate publishing time for your content assets. Thus, you’ll reduce time spent on monotonous social media management work—and focus on more creative tasks, strategy refinement, and innovation.
How to use AI in social media strategy
And now, to more details and practice:
Below, you’ll find nine ways to implement AI technology in your social media strategy. Consider those relevant to your marketing goals and campaign, and…
Let the game begin!
Way 1: Conduct audience research
AI tools can take social media posts, comments, and shares surrounding your industry, analyze them, and summarize that information into an insightful report in minutes.
You’ll get qualitative and quantitative research data on your targets’ demographics, psychographics, preferences, and customer behaviors.
More than that:
AI can also include marketing recommendations for you to grab that audience’s interest on social media. All you’ll need to do is analyze the provided data and implement the relevant insights to your social media strategy.
But that’s not all.
Ask AI to create a buyer persona for your brand. You can prompt tools like ChatGPT to come up with a persona for the audience who enjoys your product, and therefore it’s easier for you to focus on trending products your audience would love:
Image source: ChatGPT
Way 2: Manage social media ads
Use AI to identify core metrics for your social media ads or help manage the metrics you’ve prioritized for your marketing campaign.
Reach, clicks, and engagement are three core metrics to consider. AI tools can help you see:
- How many users view your social media post
- How many of them click on it (You’ll understand what sparks their curiosity or motivates them to purchase)
- How engaged they are with your ads and ready to perceive what you have for them (You’ll understand if you need to revise ad content and overall marketing strategy to impact the campaign’s results)
Depending on your goals, you may also need different AI tools for specific social media channels.
Look:
Using AI for X isn’t the same as using AI for LinkedIn. The audiences and content formats are different, so you’ll operate and create a social media plan accordingly.
AI can help you see what’s working on different platforms. It will surface the marketing tactics to keep implementing and those low-performing to skip.
Way 3: Write social media content
Social media marketers generate content to distribute across various channels. It takes time and other resources:
Not only do you craft captions and decide what visuals to post, but you are also responsible for tracking their performance and managing multiple social media accounts.
Yeap:
You have tons of tools for scheduling and monitoring the content.
But:
You’ll take your social media strategy to a new level with AI social media content creation tools.
Just enter your prompt, hashtags, and URL, and AI writers will auto-generate posts according to your required channel and the tone of voice you specify.
Also, AI assists with image creation, which is—let’s face it—a headache for many social media marketers. (You must find or craft visuals that fit your brand and repurpose them for each social media channel.)
For instance, Simplified has several features like in-built AI social media post generators that help you generate custom posts (captions and visuals) for any social media network fast.
Way 4: Predict the virality of your content
As a social media marketer, you should understand customer behavior patterns. AI will help you analyze the data and generate accurate predictions on what content most engages your targets.
Yes, it’s important to pay close attention to social media analytics and AI-powered analytic platforms offer deep insights into your social media audience and how they interact with various social post types.
With the patterns and preferences at hand, you’ll better understand what content works. This is a surefire way to more personalized and effective social media strategies.
Allow AI to help you improve the user experience with your brand on social media.
Way 5: Optimize posting for maximum engagement
First off, AI is a goldmine for your content scheduling on social media channels:
The AI-driven tools analyze historical data on user engagement and offer the most optimal times to post for peak engagement. (You’ll ensure that your social media content will reach the targets when they are most active online.)
More than that:
AI can recognize language patterns, images, and even metadata that most hook your audience. They will help you create catchy headlines, find words that appeal to your targets, and pick the most emotional lexical items to influence user buying decisions.
Way 6: Repurpose existing content for social media
Generative AI isn’t only for creating new content assets. Use it to repurpose existing content from your blog posts or landing pages for different social media platforms. For example, if you take care of affiliate content, AI can also help you repurpose existing content without putting much effort.
The same comes with video content which is time-consuming to produce, especially if talking about long-form types like live streams. So, it’s a smart idea to repurpose this video content into a series of short-form posts, so you can give AI short repurpose a try.
It’s a smart way to promote marketing content, considering the specifics of different social networks and the preferences of their audiences.
Way 7: Monitor brand mentions
Use AI-based social monitoring and listening tools to understand what people think about your brand.
Analyze brand mentions, social media comments, feedback, and reviews on Google Business or Yelp and translate that data into insights to improve your marketing strategy.
It’s a great tool to polish customer service, build brand reputation, and practice stellar communication with users on social media.
Way 8: Find trends and topics
AI social media content tools can assist with content ideation! When you are stuck and have no content ideas for your target audience, provide AI with a few keywords—and get topics to post on social media.
Let’s take a look at the tool below. It allows users to add information about ideas they want to brainstorm and get work done for them.
Also, try AI to analyze social media trends and revise your content types and themes accordingly. It will help you reach new audiences, capture their interest in your brand, and keep them engaged so that you can turn them into customers.
Way 9: Find influencers
Optimize your influencer marketing with AI!
You can leverage AI algorithms to find influencers with the most active and relevant audiences to benefit your brand.
It’s not only about their follower count or demographic.
AI tools will explore influencers’ content relevance, engagement rates, and sentiment analysis for you to ensure their audience will genuinely resonate with your marketing message. For instance, HypeAuditor is one of the AI-powered influencer research platforms that can help you craft more authentic campaigns, collaborating with popular users on social media.
Practical tips for using AI in social media
- Always review before publishing. AI social media tools have drawbacks and can make errors. Please double-check any content you generate with their help to prevent accidental plagiarism and misinformation and protect your brand.
- Be transparent. When using AI to create content or visuals, be honest with your audience about that. Explain to customers how you use this technology so they know what to expect from your brand on social media.
- Ensure data privacy. Always check with legal departments before implementing AI solutions. Ensure you have a data security and privacy policy to guarantee your customers’ safety.
- Monitor user feedback. Take note of how your customers react to AI-generated content in social media; be ready to take corrective measures if necessary.
Ready to try?
It’s the age of AI, and your job as a social media marketer is to keep up. Features and benefits of AI in social media speak volumes:
From social media listening and monitoring to processing text and visual content, you can delegate many strategic tasks to AI. Think of it as a helpful hand that saves you time and costs on your social media marketing campaign—and you’ll begin to see results that prove the game is worth the candle.
