Have you ever wondered how Artificial Intelligence transforms our daily lives? From voice generation to medical diagnoses, AI is increasingly becoming ubiquitous in our society. Marketing and social media are another popular domains where AI is bringing in a lot of changes. AI for social media market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.77% by 2028. Let’s explore the latest trends and breakthroughs in AI and how they are reshaping our world.
- Increase automated social media engagement
- Discovering new audiences and trends
- Identifying potential customers with the exact same demand to meet the requirements of both parties
- Automatically creating the social media content
- Increasing its reach to the target audience
- Update and reformat the content for different channels without human intervention.
- Target desired audience to regulate the expenditure
- Image recognition for insights into a behavioral pattern.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence for Social Media
Artificial Intelligence serves the following benefits for social media:
- Accelerates revenue
- Reduces investments
- Content optimization
- Analyzes sentiments
- Increases security
- Enhances user experience
- Interaction via AI-powered chatbots
Recognizing the power of AI for accelerated performance, different well-known social media platforms have opted for AI integrations, including:
- Twitter: The AI incorporation performs functions like creating thumbnails from images, answering comments and tweeting.
- Pinterest: It provides personalized content for 200 billion users with an exceptional output of 80% purchases.
- Linkedin: A professional platform, Linkedin connects employers and employees who match the job perfectly. It can focus on the candidates actively seeking generalized or specific job roles.
- Instagram: The platform’s AI algorithm can easily find the desired content. Simple likes, comments and following different pages provide similar content.
The mentioned AI applications for social media are based on the following aspects discussed in detail:
Social Listening and Monitoring
Social listening is macroscale research to understand the comments, reviews, and reactions to a brand or industry’s products. Social monitoring is microscale research for identifying, tracking, and replying to individual brand mentions on social media. Both help brands learn what people say about them and their products online.
1. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis refers to understanding consumers’ views and perceptions of a specific brand, facility, service, product or industry. It done through either of three methods; rule-based approach, hybrid and automatic system.
2. Topic Clustering
It introduces the specific topic for content creation rather than long-tail keywords, which was associated with high self and other-party competition. It focuses on topic-based keywords, and topic clustering enhances the SERP rankings and provides worthy backlinks.
3. Trend Analysis
Trend analysis is also a part of social media listening and monitoring. It leads to conversation monitoring about the company. It also provides insights into the common trends and their influence on people to curate AI-powered social media marketing strategies. Several AI-based tools are available for trend analysis.
Content Creation and Curation
AI Content creation is among the most beneficial and intriguing methods of reaching and creating automated social media engagement among the audience. Increasing the information and connecting with target individuals becomes easy. AI further betters the result through the following:
1. Automated Content Generation
Attractive and more audience-preferred content creation is easy through Artificial intelligence. Besides content creation and optimization for updates, AI can bulk schedule and generate desired content within a few minutes. The content can be image or audio based with well-researched aspects. Moreover, it generates new ideas or provides outlines based on keyword research.
2. Image and Video Recognition
Image and video recognition are the best methods to understand the brand’s familiarity and usage through pictures and videos on social media. By understanding the metrics and services, the brands can evaluate the consumer’s behavior, expectations and usage. Image and video recognition is a step ahead of social media listening and monitoring.
3. Content Personalization
AI-powered social media marketing will be more engaging for the customers. It is based on the personalized requirements of a customer. Understanding preferences and interests help provide precise requirements to the customer, saving them time.
Customer Service and Support
It is a communication channel between customers and the brand. Misinterpretation or poor customer service in this aspect will mostly result in loss of customers. A better and more precise approach is possible through AI incorporation into customer service and support, eventually leading to social media automation.
1. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
The 24*7 possibility to interact and get queries resolved is a great but impractical idea for the company’s human-based service and cost aspect. The AI chatbots and virtual assistants can better understand humans’ sentiments and speech and respond to solve issues. The introduction of Alexa and Siri are common examples of virtual assistants providing the best service and social media automation.
2. Automated Responses and Ticket Routing
The customer request or complaint might need to be handled by someone with expertise in the topic. The same is possible through automated responses and ticket routing, which eases direct and immediate connection with the correct individual in the company. Transferring the call to understanding the issue among different service providers would be a frustrating alternative.
3. Social CRM Integration
CRM, or customer relationship management, connects businesses and customers on social media. Intelligent social media management helps better relationships between the two parties due to the quality of service the brand offers. The latter is possible through a better understanding of requirements through interaction and available data.
The applications of AI in social media have provided proven advantages. The same are enlisted below:
1. Enhanced Customer Experience
The AI helps interpret customers’ demands, likes and dislikes without interfering or interacting. This eliminates exhaustion and irrelevant expressions. The social and behavioral data allows insights into the customer’s needs with reliable accuracy. The information also enlightens brands about customers’ psychology, further helping provide targeted products or services. The predictive analysis further allows for meeting the customer’s requirements and serving them first.
2. Improved Marketing Efficiency and Effectiveness
It is possible through the automation of tedious and repetitive tasks, and AI can help curate personalized experiences through private communication. The pattern and trend identification, people’s participation, and liking or disliking about the same further enhance marketing efficiency and effectiveness. The AI can also identify preferred channels for advertising, window shopping, and buying goods to increase efficiency. Thus, social media automation benefits both parties: customers and brands.
3. Increased Engagement and Brand Loyalty
Increased automated social media engagement of a brandoccurs through delivering the quality customers desire. The same is likely supposed to provide brand loyalty and attract new customers through personal customer communication. AI helps increase engagement by clarifying the customer’s requirements and preferences. The dislikes can be further evaluated to understand the personalized or generalized choices of negativity against a certain feature or item.
4. Better Risk Management and Crisis Response
The AI-based crisis response database is designed to identify victim, accidental and intentional clusters and the different possibilities of crisis response which are denied, diminished, rebuilt and bolstered. The algorithm contains enough information to identify or compare the present situation with previous data and act accordingly for intelligent social media management. The involved parameters are brand reputation, crisis timespan, audience reaction and multiple other factors.
5. Data-Driven Insights and Decision Making
The accuracy and reliability of data concerning different aspects like increasing revenue, controlling expenditure and enhancing the customer experience are better than human-generated and interpreted data. These are among the prime factors responsible for decision-making; hence, AI-based analytics enhances performance.
The efficiency of AI for social media is linked with several well-thought and justified challenges:
1. Ethical Concerns
The information collection, interpretation and storage of the user’s choices, history, preferences and personalized data come under ethical concerns. Privacy violations and biased interpretations of human behavior are also ethical concerns.
2. Accuracy and Bias Issues
The AI defines the users by over or underrepresenting specific patterns or data. The issues arise when the same is utilized for decision-making or providing output to the user. The results may only sometimes be favorable, leading to inaccuracy and data discrepancies.
3. Integration and Implementation Challenges
There are still certain aspects of AI unknown to humans. The unfamiliarity to these is the cause of concern as the unknown can lead to unsolvable problems. The implementation is flawed because human intervention is required in certain things which can only function properly with human interference.
Human intervention is a must to unleash the power of AI for social media or any other venture. Follow the below-mentioned practices to avoid chances of errors:
1. Understanding Your Audience
The brands on social media can utilize the maximum potential by identifying the customers’ variety, work culture, likes, dislikes, familiarity with the brand, opinions and other things. Thus, a significant part of AI-powered social media marketing for the targeted audience is devising an effective marketing plan and even the product or service.
2. Choosing the Right AI Tools
Know the requirements before choosing the AI for social media. Being the top or high features tool is one of many things to check. Knowing the specific domain or if it meets the goal is necessary. For instance, if a content creation tool meets the required word count, delivers plagiarism-free articles, and can write content or only create headings. One may also check if it can optimize or update the content. Identifying the goals goes for all the required AI tools.
3. Ensuring Quality Control and Human Oversight
Remember that AI assists humans. Quality control over its action is necessary to understand the correct interpretation of patterns and results, and human oversight is the only reliable power to do so. Employing another AI for quality control is bad for understanding accuracy, safety, and upholding human values.
4. Continuous Learning and Improvement
The possible errors must be continuously rectified in AI for social media. The constant changes in demand further require AI improvement to function properly and meet customer requirements. It will lead to intelligent social media management and dataset expansion. Improvement in quality and data augmentation is among the methods for AI improvement.
5. Adapting to Changes in Social Media Trends and Algorithms
The AI for social media can adapt to regular changes in social media by providing commands from relevant sources and summaries of conversations and experiences from online communities.
AI in Social Media – Case Studies
AI has been utilized in different multinational companies to provide extraordinary services and customer satisfaction. Let’s understand it better with examples:
Alibaba
Alibaba has successfully implemented AI in the first fashion store in Hong Kong. It has provided access to smart mirrors on sales floors and changing rooms that allow an effortless finding of items and adding them to a virtual basket. The gyro-sensors sense and record the movement of items. The intelligent garment tags and low-energy Bluetooth chips help the garments carry details on the size and color of the garment.
Nike
Nike has incorporated AI in their customer interaction model since 2017. It allows designing one’s Nike pair, with prompt delivery within 90 minutes. The action was based on AI marketing analytics to provide design and graphics suited for shoppers, further brought to reality through augmented reality and projects on Nike sneakers. It also benefited Nike by allowing them to collect users’ preferred choices and overloading them with ideas for upcoming products.
AI for social media is overseeing constant development owing to efficient results. Some of these are discussed below:
Emerging Trends and Technologies
AI is being developed constantly to provide better experiences and achieve activities impossible for humans. Examples are:
- The development of emerging trends and technologies
- Further optimization in predictive analytics
- Information security
- Creation of art and creative space
- Digital avatars
- Developing of military weapons
- Discovering of business processes
- Improving AI ethics
Potential Impact on the Social Media Landscape
The AI for social media helps identify human behavior and distinguish between malicious and benign content. It will be better to identify harmful or violating content accurately. AI will also be able to limit plagiarized content creation by humans and encourage diversity and variability.
Wrapping Up
AI has evolved a lot, witnessing numerous successful services and easing human life, and it is further evolving. The benefit easily applies to social media, where brands, influencers, startups, and other potential individuals can utilize it for their growth and development. To explore the true potential of AI for social media, it is a must to adopt human intervention, apply the best practices, and opt for smarter techniques because, ultimately, the human mind is far smarter than AI. Keep following Analytics Vidhya blogs and get latest updates of the world of AI!
Frequently Asked Questions
A. Artificial intelligence for social media to personalize content, target ads, and detect fake accounts and hate speech. It can also analyze user behavior to suggest relevant content and improve user experience.
A. Yes, AI can create social media posts. For instance, tools like Artie, Lately, and Hugging Face’s DALL-E can generate captions, hashtags, and even images for posts.
A. There is no single AI that creates social media content. Instead, different AI technologies, such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, are combined to automate different tasks.
A. To create a social media post with AI, you can use AI-powered tools like Canva, Lumen5, and Wordsmith. These platforms use machine learning to generate visuals, videos, and text for social media.
A. Instagram uses AI to recommend content to users, filter spam, and moderate content. It also uses computer vision to enable features like face filters and object recognition.
By Analytics Vidhya, March 30, 2023.
