Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Social Media Marketing

The most recent big technological break to hit the social media marketing world is artificial intelligence integration.

To be clear, artificial intelligence is not a risk to human domination as indicated by a good number of blockbuster movies. It is simply a way to gather, sort through and analyze the massive amount of customer behavior information, user-generated content and data swirling around the social media space to make much smarter, faster and more targeted decisions for your business through providing an overall better and more satisfactory customer social experience. In some circles, artificial intelligence is simply referred to as “Big Intelligence”

Facebook is leading the pack in terms of the many innovative ways they have leveraged AI to improve its product. From automatic tagging, news feed stories, audience insights for ads, creating lookalike audiences and much more. AI is still a relatively new technology to social media channels and there are still a lot of roads to travel for “social artificial intelligence” to be fully integrated into every major social media platform’s offering to better help marketers discover, engage and target their audience optimally.

The possibilities of social AI are endless. Here are three ways artificial intelligence can be leveraged for the betterment of social media marketing.

Boost engagement levels in much less time

A marketer’s task of social media activities and performances of stories, posts, and ads can be very daunting, especially if these are done on behalf of a huge company that employs a lot of engagement in social media. Monitoring these activities usually takes away a large chunk of time from the marketer — time that could have been used creating and working on innovative, fresh and more relevant content for their audience. Constantly studying ad metrics and post or story numbers can stifle creativity.

With AI, you would be able to free up the time you spend on these tasks so that you can focus on the more creative aspects of your marketing campaign. AI integration can take care of all repetitive and everyday tasks that fall into the categories of responsibilities such as customer support and recommendations while providing us with invaluable data to spark even more creativity while amplifying our overall performance improvement.

The New York Times integrated a chatbot to help automate a significant proportion of their 300 daily social media page posts. An assessment of the campaign showed that the content generated by the intelligent bot yielded about 380 percent more clicks.

Social AI can predict how good your social media posts will perform and which posts to prioritize, what audience bracket will yield better engagement rates, the best times of the day to post for maximum engagement and conversion and a lot more. If you want to free up time spent on engagement-related tasks while keeping engagement levels high, you can’t-do better than AI integration.

Reward brand followers in more creative ways

Imagine this. A guy has been waiting at a bus stop for ages. And it just so happens that he is standing in front of a digital screen displaying an ad for a beer brand that he likes and follows on Facebook. Then the screen suddenly flashes a greeting to him and displays a voucher code for a free beer or triggers the same code to be sent to his Facebook inbox. This will only be possible because of Facebook’s massively successful facial recognition technology.

However, this instance is an example of how brands can use this tech on a much wider scale to target their followers in many more innovative ways to boost their social strategy, influence, and loyalty.

Continuously monitor the market sentiment of your brand

Social media is ultimately all about human interaction and that will never change. SEO and Social go hand in hand. The importance of social media in the SEO strategy should never be neglected. Chatbots have been employed by various companies to handle customer conversations and have actually proven to be successful on numerous occasions.

The area of semantic analysis in AI holds great promise. It will make it possible for machines to be able to recognize the way sentences are formed and how words are used together to convey meaning in the text. It will be able to categorize and process words, phrases, slang and any other method of communication on social media according to requirements.

For example, say you have a massive survey and need to sift through the plethora of answers to get a sense of what your audience is thinking. That much work can bring anyone to a creative and productive halt.

Social AI could be helpful in expediting the survey analysis by determining key phrases, word patterns, and sentence structures to grasp the prevalent sentiment among your audience and customers. This knowledge will help you better choose what to talk about, how to structure your posts and how to go about customer research on social media.