Social media has become an integral part of lives. Social media platforms are continuously evolving to increase their engagement and reach. Social media platforms have started integrating AI technologies into their processes to make the user experience better and more immersive.
Brands today integrate AI in social media campaigns to make them more effective, efficient and yield better results. AI tools are being used to do difficult tasks with ease and faster. Take a look at how marketers are using AI tools for their social media campaigns and how you can do it too.
5 use cases of AI in social media
AI has found some very useful offerings that help the owners of social media platforms do their initial work of connecting people better while consuming less time and effort.
1. Large-scale data analysis
The main goal of social media platforms today is to have most users active on their platforms for as long as possible. This pushes social platforms to generate innovative ways to keep users engaged. The key to this is to provide them with content they feel connected to, which is relevant to them.
To do this, a lot of tracking and collection of data is required. It becomes rather impossible to collect data on such a huge number of users that present social media platforms have. Hence, the use of AI helps these platforms track the users' activity. AI helps collect as much data on the user as possible, including data like age, gender, the places you visit, the movies you like, songs you listen to and much more.
This data is then analyzed to better understand the user's interests and create a more concrete profile. The platform can then push more posts of similar nature or niche to cater to the user's interests and keep them longer.
2. Increased security
There have been many cases where one would come across a profile on one of the social media platforms with their name, profile picture and some horrifying description on them or offensive actions. Fake profiles are a common sight on social media platforms.
AI algorithms on social media are used to detect fraudulent activities like fake profiles. These algorithms are also used to detect any unusual behavior compared to the previous profile activity to restrict the chances of being hacked.
3. Content moderation
Social media platforms usually are free to join. It attracts all kinds of crowds, including those who incite hatred and bully other online users. The huge number of users makes it virtually impossible to moderate each and every post and comment.
AI allows such platforms to monitor these posts and comments to check the spread of any adverse media. AI has image and video analysis capabilities. It analyzes texts, images and videos in real-time and flags any potentially problematic content, allowing human moderators to take appropriate action. This helps in creating a safer and more welcoming environment.
4. Smart advertising
Social media is a vast sea of people and while it does provide advertisers with a huge audience for their campaigns, advertising to all of them can be very expensive.
AI reduces this cost by optimizing advertising campaigns. AI tools analyze customer data and create customer profiles, with the help of which advertisers can target a specific user set based on factors like age, gender, demographics, etc.
AI algorithms are also used to allocate ad budgets across campaigns and platforms based on the performance of the ads.
💡 Related guide: How and Why You Should Build an AI Advertising Strategy
5. Automates repetitive tasks
The various tasks involved in managing a social media campaign may require a big team and can be quite expensive to run.
Different tasks like researching the market, picking the target audience, monitoring the performance of individual posts or campaigns, writing social media copies and templatising them etc., can now be done by the various AI-powered tools available on the market. These AI tools considerably reduce the time required for performing these tasks and make it possible to automate heavy tasks to free bandwidth for other tasks.
4 examples of use of AI on social media platforms
While we have already talked about some of the more common use cases of AI in the different social media platforms in general, let’s take a look at some special use cases of AI on some of the more known platforms below.
Facebook is a popular social media platform and has over 2.98 billion monthly active users. It offers a diverse range of features and helps people connect with friends, family and businesses.
- DeepText: DeepText is an AI engine developed by Facebook. It is designed to understand the content on the platform and the context in which words are used. It analyzes Facebook’s posts, messages and comments.
Facebook uses it to increase the accuracy of translations. It also improves personalization and provides more relevant ads and feeds. Facebook also uses this to identify hate speech, bullying, fake information and other harmful content to improve customer experience, among other applications.
Facial recognition: Facebook uses AI-based facial recognition to identify people in photos automatically. For instance, if a photo is uploaded with some people in it, AI analyzes the photo to identify the individuals present in that photo. It creates a unique digital representation of the face called a faceprint and then compares it to other previously stored faceprints to find any matches. If there’s a match, Facebook suggests the name of the person the faceprint matched with to allow the uploader of the photo to tag the person in it.
Targeted advertising: Facebook uses AI to analyze large-scale data to understand users' interests and preferences better. Once it has created a profile on a user based on their preferences and behavior, it matches this profile with other users with similar interests or behavior. Facebook calls this the Lookalike Audience feature. Once a lookalike audience has been identified, Facebook can then target the audience with similar advertisements.
Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to share short messages called tweets with their followers. It allows users to also followe, share, like and comment on tweets of other users including famous personalities.
Smart cropping: Smart cropping is a feature that twitter uses to display the most important part of a photo while displaying it on a device. Twitter uses AI to analyze the content of the image and identify the most important part of the image that should be kept while cropping it to optimize for the different kinds of displays like monitor, laptop, mobile or tablet. This saves web designers and content creators time so that they don’t have to crop and resize the image manually and also provides a better customer experience to the audience.
Tweet ranking: Tweet ranking is a feature by which Twitter organizes the tweets on a user’s timeline, search feed, etc. AI ranks the tweets on the basis of:
- Recency
- Engagement
- Relevance
AI also analyzes the behavior of the user on the account as well as the quality of the accounts that engage with a particular tweet. This helps Twitter provide highly engaging and highly relevant tweets to the users to maximize customer engagement.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a social media platform that is very popular with the younger generation. It allows users to share photos and videos that disappear after being viewed once. It also has filters and lenses that engage its users and make creative content.
Filters and lenses: One of the most attractive features of Snapchat is the use of lenses and filters. Snapchat uses AI to recognize faces and objects and overlays graphics, animations and special effects over them in real time.
My AI: My AI is a chatbot by Snapchat exclusively for users of Snapchat. It is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users can interact with the chatbot and ask it to plan trips for them, write poems, answer questions, offer advice on the perfect gift, etc. This helps Snapchat create a more engaging experience.
Say hi to My AI 👻 pic.twitter.com/mZW0TNEuJj
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) February 27, 2023
Instagram is a social media platform that allows users to sharing photos and videos to express their creativity or to provide entertainment to other users. Instagram reels, that section that delivers short form videos are immensely popular among the younger generation too.
Additionally, Instagram's utilization of Facebook's AI algorithm, DeepText, goes beyond just content moderation. It plays a pivotal role in enhancing user engagement by targeting the right audience, ultimately helping you gain followers who share common interests and engage with your content more effectively. This personalized approach to content discovery not only enriches the user experience but also aids creators and businesses in building a more dedicated and loyal following on the platform.
Moderate content: Instagram uses Facebook’s AI algorithm DeepText to understand the content and the context of messages and images and determine if the posts or comments are offensive in nature thereby deciding whether they need to be moderated. This also helps them eliminate possible cases of cyberbullying.
Generate captions: Instagram users know about the IGTC section of the app. IGTV provides users with longer videos different from the reels section of the app. Instagram uses AI to generate captions for these videos when played. This has also helped individuals with hearing impairments to be able to enjoy the content.
How to use AI in social media marketing
Creating a social media marketing campaign requires a lot of planning, work and time to execute. With the use of AI tools for the tasks involved in creating such a marketing campaign, brands can reduce time consumption considerably and also make their work easier in the process.
1. Research the market trends and the audience
Before you start building your social media marketing campaign, it is important to have knowledge of what resonates with the audience. You can gather this information by doing thorough research on social media platforms to see what is trending with your target audience right now. This is called social media listening.
While doing this can be very time-consuming, AI tools like Hootsuite Insights can do this research on your behalf and provide you with the information in a much shorter time. You can use this information to understand what’s trending with your target audience and proceed further.
💡 Related guide: A Comprehensive Guide to Social Media Lead Generation
2. Create content
Next up on your list is to use the collected data to create content that resonates with your audience. This includes creating posts, memes, etc., for your audience to interact with and share.
Creating content and brainstorming ideas for the content isn’t an easy task. It requires a lot of concentration, time and patience. Using AI tools like Jasper.ai can drastically increase the number of posts you can write for your audience within a given time. The created content may or may not sit perfectly with your content creation team but it sure helps generate enough motivation to get the work done. AI tools can also help you generate visually appealing campaign images and videos.
AI can also help you curate a collection of content that is highly engaging with the audience. This also gives you something to refer to when creating content for your campaigns.
💡 Related guide: 11 AI Copywriting Tools to Save You 100+ Hours of Work
3. Optimize and schedule your content
Many variables are considered to determine how well an uploaded content will perform on social media. This includes the time and day of uploading the content, the structure of the post, the topic, the keywords used and even the hashtags used, among others.
AI has the ability to analyze the best-performing posts in terms of keywords, hashtags and others to give you suggestions to optimize your posts for best results. SproutSocial, for instance, helps you to do the same. You can also use it to schedule your posts to be posted at the optimum time of the day for the best reach.
4. Collect insights
An average social media campaign can have many posts scheduled to be posted at regular intervals. It is also important to analyze the individual posts to understand their performance. It becomes rather difficult to keep track of so many posts under the same campaign.
AI helps in analyzing the posts in real time to provide valuable insights. This helps social media managers to understand the audience better and plan and tweak future posts accordingly.
These insights also help brands to promote their products to the right audience. Google Ads, for instance, uses AI for Smart Bidding which uses machine learning to bid on ad spaces that are most likely to lead to conversions. It also AI to generate ad variations to improve ad performance.
5. Create social media reports
Social media reporting is the process of analyzing and presenting the social media performance in terms of engagement, reach and growth in the number of followers. This tends to become very difficult to track if a brand runs multiple campaigns on various social media platforms.
Socialbakers, for instance, is an AI tool that allows you to keep a track of this. AI allows you to analyze vast amounts of data and also provide insights. AI can do this in much less time and with much more accuracy. This allows brands to make faster and data driven decisions for a more successful campaign.
💡 Related guide: How to Create a Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising Campaign
5 AI tools for social media management
While many AI tools are available out there that perform different tasks and offer different functionalities, it is important to analyze your needs and choose the right tool to serve the exact purpose. Take a look at the list below that may help you decide on the right tool for your business’s social media campaign.
1. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an AI-powered suite of tools that provides a host of services. It allows you to track social media conversations for posts, comments, and relevant conversations. It also helps gain insights into social media trends by conducting market research.
It even allows real-time monitoring to detect unusual activities or emerging crises and notify the relevant authorities.
Social media management is another important feature that lets you collaborate, schedule, edit and publish all your content from one place.
Brandwatch also offers you a feature that helps you to discover influencers, handle relationships with them and manage all your influencer content in one place with the ability to measure the success of such campaigns.
💡 Related guide: 9 AI Tools for Small Businesses to Make Teams More Efficient
2. Elai.io
Elai.io can help you build customized AI videos with a presenter in minutes without having to use a camera, a studio or a green screen. You can choose from the 25+ avatars already available for your videos or create your own custom one. It provides you with features like voice cloning, automated translations, generating videos from texts, turning your article into a video, converting PowerPoint presentations into videos and more.
Brands can use Elai to create videos without having to use a camera and record physically. It eliminates the need for long hours of shooting and technical equipment to create videos.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite makes social media management easy and convenient. Hootsuite’s OwnlyWriter can instantly generate social media captions in the tone and voice you desire from a short description or a URL.
It can generate a list of content ideas and even write your posts for you. You can even use its repurpose tool to recreate content or posts similar to your top-performing posts without duplication.
Hootsuite even allows you to publish content to all your social media profiles simultaneously and keep track of their performances. It also allows you to manage your social media ads and provides insights on the best time to publish your posts and research your audience. It also allows for social media listening.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is another platform that offers a host of functionalities. It helps you to discover the most popular content in your niche. It also allows you to track mentions of your brand and also create alerts for other topics that might be relevant to your brand.
It even helps you to find influencers based on your brand’s preferences, connect with them and manage interactions. It also provides other services like crisis management.
5. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is another AI-powered social media management platform. It offers functionalities like social media scheduling, content publishing, social listening, etc.
Its Smart Social Inbox categorizes incoming messages based on their content, urgency and sentiment and assigns them to the right team.
It also provides an AI tool that provides insights on improving engagement and reach.
Limitations of AI in social media
While there are numerous functionalities and use cases of AI in social media management and the creation of social media marketing campaigns, a fair share of challenges also need to be addressed.
Social media addiction
AI is extensively used to provide more relevant content to the audience to keep them active on the platforms. This has led to a vast library of relevant content that can be viewed by a user at any time.
Most social media platforms have even emphasized on shorter videos of 15 to 60 seconds over longer videos as they drive more engagement. AI makes it more addictive by making these videos more relevant to the users’ interests.
This has led people to spend hours on social media scrolling through their feeds and consider their social media presence more important than their real lives. This documentary on Netlfix even speaks about how social media has become a problem today.
Plagiarism
While AI tools can be useful for creating content quickly, it relies on already existing information to do this. What AI tools do is pick up information from various sources, paraphrase this information and then deliver the information.
This makes it very difficult for plagiarism detection tools to check for plagiarism. AI tools are extensively used by students alike to generate essays and reports. Combined with the failure of plagiarism detection, it results in new ways of students being able to ‘cheat’ their way out of work. This can highly affect the development of students’ learning.
False information
Even in generating the content, AI relies on curating information available online to deliver the requested information. This results in the same information being circulated over and over again without the creation of new ones.
AI also is limited in terms of being able to track information back to its source. Hence, it’s unable to separate the right information from the wrong. This results in the circulation of false information with ease. For instance, anybody who has shown interest in posts that show how one religion is treating the other badly, AI will push more such content towards the user without any assurance of whether it is true or false.
Future of AI in social media
AI has been actively introduced to different social media platforms to help them make their platform more engaging and the content more relevant to the users. This is still the first phase, and AI will be integrated even more deeply into these social media platforms for a more immersive experience.
AI influencers
As AI technology is evolving, we are seeing more and more AI-generated influencers. These influencers are designed to be more relatable, engaging and persuasive than their human counterparts.
Wunni is an example of a virtual influencer. She has instagram account with 11.4k followers. You can even chat with her on the Line app. There are other virtual influencers you can check out like Ion Göttlich with 76.3K followers and B. with 244K followers on Instagram.
As technology advances, virtual influencers are going to become more and more prominent and realistic. This will ultimately make it easier for brands to generate influencers for their campaigns who would be able to connect with the audience on a deeper level.
Influencer research
AI has a promising future in influencer research. It can analyze massive amounts of data and identify the most suitable influencers for a campaign. As AI technology advances, we can see more precise and efficient influencer research and better measurement and optimization of campaigns.
Takeaway
AI is transforming social media by enhancing the efficiency, accuracy and effectiveness of campaigns. It helps in content creation, ad management, content management and influencer research.
As AI advances, we will see more use cases in the normal day-to-day workings of campaigns and social media management. Although, it is important to consider the limitations and ethical implications of using AI in social media.
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