Do you rely on social media to build an audience, drive engagement with your brand and content, and convert prospects into leads or sales across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other platforms?
If so, you need to be considering how artificial intelligence can dramatically increase the revenues you bring in from social, while reducing the costs of social media strategy, creation, and management.
AI-powered tools are being deployed today by brands to:
In this post, we describe how AI can transform how every social media marketer does their work, then offer some practical use cases and vendors to start investigating.
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term that covers several different technologies, like machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, deep learning, and more.
At their core, AI technology helps machines perform specific cognitive tasks as well as or better than humans.
For instance, AI-powered computer vision systems in self-driving cars are able to identify obstacles just like people do, allowing the machine to take the wheel.
Your favorite voice assistant, like Alexa or Siri, understands your words just like another person, then responds in kind-all using AI.
Amazon and Netflix use AI recommendation engines to offer up products and movies you might like, making assumptions about your preferences just like a fellow product or movie enthusiast might.
While there are a ton of complexities to different types of AI, all you really need to know right now is that "artificial intelligence" describes many different types of smart technologies.
And even one AI powered tool can have a serious impact your marketing career and performance.
That's because AI isn't just automation, though it may include elements of intelligent automation. AI takes things a few steps further.
These technologies analyze large datasets. They don't just crunch numbers, though.
They use advanced computer science techniques and superior computational firepower to extract insights from data. These insights can then be used to make predictions, recommendations, and decisions.
In the process, the most advanced AI systems actually use machine learning to improve their predictions, recommendations, and decisions as they make more of them.
The world's most popular social media platforms have AI at their core.
By quickly understanding how top platforms use AI, you can quickly see why AI is so important in social media.
Facebook uses AI to do everything from translate foreign languages to automatically classify images. In fact, AI is at the very center of how Facebook works.
The company's AI algorithms predict what content you will engage with most, based on your historical engagement. The platform then serves that content to you.
Facebook also uses AI to suggest ad copy and target advertising to audiences most likely to click and act on your ads.
Today, the company relies on AI for content moderation, using it to filter out offensive or harmful images, video, and text at scale.
Like Facebook, Instagram uses AI to target ads and serve you interesting content based on what you've engaged with in the past.
It also leans on AI to filter out spam, since the platform has problems with spam bots posting comments and content.
A big way YouTube now uses AI is to fight misinformation by identifying and flagging videos trying to spread the conspiracy theories and fake news that have proliferated in recent years.
YouTube also relies on AI to serve you content that it thinks you'll like to watch next.
TikTok is one of the first social media platforms to be almost entirely governed by AI. Every video you see on TikTok is directly determined by AI ranking algorithms, optimized to deliver content that keeps you on the app.
Not to mention, TikTok has very, very smart AI: it learns from you quickly as you use it, serving up content completely customized to your interests.
TikTok also relies exclusively on AI to initially analyze videos uploaded to the platform (though humans may enter the review process later).
In every case, major social media platforms use AI to determine what users see and what they engage with.
That means understanding AI use cases is critical for any marketer or business trying to reach consumers.
In fact, AI makes social media marketing better in two big ways for social media managers:
That's because AI excels at extracting insights and patterns from large sets of data, including finding signals from social media platforms, advertising data, audience data, and social media performance data.
The result?
AI has a ton of powerful use cases across different social media marketing channels, objectives, and disciplines.
AI and intelligent automation can help you produce sharable content for each social media platform you use, and then manage the distribution of that content.
A number of AI-powered tools exist to deliver insights from your brand's social media content, profiles and audience.
Artificial intelligence tools exist today that will actually write social media ads for you. The ads are optimized for clicks and conversions, thanks to AI's ability to predict at scale which language will improve results.
Now that you know what AI can do for social media, you might be wondering what solutions out there actually do it.
Now that you know what AI can do for social media, you might be wondering what solutions out there actually do it.
Persado's AI automatically learns your brand voice, then writes like your brand on Facebook and Instagram.
Trender.ai is a social media management platform powered by machine learning that allows you to do smarter social listening, improve productivity, and increase social ROI.
Socialbakers uses AI to power social influencer discovery, audience analysis, and to manage social media activities across channels.
Lately uses AI to produce social media messages at scale from your content, learning what works best over time.
Linkfluence leverages AI to help companies detect consumer trends across social media channels.
Cortex uses artificial intelligence to determine what social media posts work best and what creative will be most effective.
Phrasee uses advanced AI and machine learning to automatically write Facebook and Instagram ads for you in your brand voice.
The examples and information above all point to one conclusion:
AI has really changed social media.
Social media platforms now rely on AI to do, well, everything. And social media marketers now use AI to decrease costs and increase revenue across many different activities.
But are these changes good or bad?
The answer depends on where AI is being applied—and how.
AI in social media offers social media platforms obvious benefits.
They are able to target content and ads with a precision that was previously impossible. In turn, this increases revenue because people spend more time on their platforms and click on more ads.
AI also helps social media companies combat hard problems around content moderation that would otherwise be difficult to solve—a development that protects both platforms and users alike.
For diehard users, AI is also helpful. After all, you're looking to be engaged on a social media platform, so receiving more content you like benefits you.
Not to mention, users are also consumers, and consumers benefit when they're served relevant ads for products they actually want to buy.
For social media marketers, AI helps them capture huge efficiencies in their work creating social campaigns. It also helps them achieve far better performance thanks to AI's ability to precisely target consumers and predict outcomes.
But of course AI in social media has downsides.
Facebook is a high-profile example of this.
According to a whistleblower, the company's AI algorithms actively contributed to the spread of misinformation, division, and hate because the AI and humans at Facebook prioritized maximum engagement. This had very real, and very negative, mental and physical effects on users.
According to the same whistleblower, Instagram's content (selected by algorithms) caused young girls to have negative feelings about body image.
In many cases, there are examples of AI that is specifically designed to maximize engagement among users. And the most engagement often comes from divisive and polarizing content that causes outrage.
This can cause problems for social media marketers, too.
In one scenario, AI failures at major social media platforms mean that your brand's content could show up next to hate speech or inappropriate content—damaging you in the process.
In another, marketers themselves may be tempted to use AI tools that maximize engagement for their own campaigns, further perpetuating a cycle of using polarization to cut through the noise.