Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a pipe dream. It’s real, and it’s here to change our world. AI is more entwined with our daily lives than most people imagine. If you have used voice assistance at least once or watched a video recommended by YouTube, you’ve already interacted with the automated intellect.
The practice of using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or TikTok to market their business has already become common among brands. Perhaps, the next big trend in marketing is going to be unlocking and utilizing the enormous (if not infinite) potential of AI.
Studies predict that by 2023, the market of AI in social media will hit USD 2.2 billion, compared to only USD 0.6 billion in 2018. That’s quite an increase!
From filters on Snapchat to job recommendations on LinkedIn, most of your favourite social network features are made possible by AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Moreover, many widespread e-commerce tools heavily rely on Artificial Intelligence to filter and analyze big data. All these numbers and facts combine to show one thing — AI’s role in social media marketing is undeniable. What this means for you, as a start-up owner, social media influencer, digital marketer, or simply a techie, is that understanding and embracing Artificial Intelligence can give a noticeable boost to your business or career.
This blog post will help you gain a deeper understanding of AI’s impact on social media marketing, how it benefits businesses, and what AI-fuelled tools are available that can come in handy in shaping and refining your brand strategy.
Let’s dive in!
Image Recognition
Social media platforms are saturated with images. Take a look at your Instagram profile or Pinterest boards. Now, imagine how much companies can learn about you and your preferences by doing the same. Manually screening hundreds of photos of each individual would be too gruelling of a task for larger companies. This is where AI and Machine Learning step in. Advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies can scan a large number of photos instantly, then examine and sort them as needed. Facebook employs Machine Learning to extract specific data from images, such as the appearance of products, brand logos, etc. Gaining insight into what your interests, needs, and even aesthetics are, Facebook is able to offer you content and product recommendations that you’re more likely to enjoy.
As a business owner, this opens up a whole new world of opportunities for product marketing and online advertising. By identifying consumers who enjoy products similar to yours, you can narrow down your audience to target the precise demographic that your marketing efforts should be directed toward. This will enable you to cut unnecessary costs while your ROI skyrockets.
Face Recognition
Similar to image recognition in many ways, facial recognition is a unique enough phenomenon to be discussed separately. In 2010, Facebook became the first social platform to implement facial recognition, identifying people in photos they hadn’t been tagged in. (If you were initially puzzled by this, you’re not alone). Since then, face recognition has become far more common and accurate. A 2019 study expects that by 2024, the facial recognition market will generate USD 7 billion of revenue. But what’s even more astonishing is that the modern face detecting software has advanced enough to identify emotions on a human face.
Examples of facial recognition applications are everywhere, but let’s examine the potential of this striking advancement in social media marketing. One obvious benefit it can have for businesses is helping to get to know their clients more closely. A quick glimpse of a customer’s day-to-day life can help companies shape much more accurate and well-rounded buyer personas.
On top of that, detecting consumers’ moods results in better targeted, more relevant ads tailored to each customer’s emotional state.
Text Understanding
Machine Learning algorithms analyze not only how you look but also how you communicate, engage with various content, react to different topics, and so on. It’s all thanks to another intriguing tech buzzword known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Simply put, NLP is the process of teaching machines to interpret and analyze the natural language — i.e., the human language.
Google Translate, Grammarly, Microsoft Word, Alexa, and all technologies and tools alike rely on NLP to decode — or should we say code — the human language and respond accordingly. In fact, this phenomenal mechanism is the secret behind the legendary AI bot that interviewed Billie Eillish! Check out the video below:
Text -deciphering algorithms are widely used across most social media platforms. Facebook has been successfully using a deep learning engine called DeepText to filter the colossal text-based data present both on Facebook and Instagram.
The two main applications of DeepText are in impelling the content that people enjoy and removing spam or inappropriate content. Facebook also claims that its algorithms help suicide prevention.
Customers’ posts, comments, and online interactions with a brand provide invaluable insights into how the said brand is perceived. It can be a daunting job for a human to search and scan the whole web for a fuller picture of how the public reacts to and interacts with your business. But for AI, delivering quicker, more thorough, and accurate results is a breeze.
Social Media Management
The impact of Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most direct and imminent on social media management. Today, most businesses have a presence on multiple social media networks. This accomplishes two things — extends the business’s outreach to its audience and complicates the social media management process.
AI has proven to be a reliable assistant in scheduling and distributing social media content. There are a plethora of intelligent tools that analyze post engagement, gather valuable data from customer feedback, and offer strategic post recommendations. AI can help with post creation as well. Certain tools contract larger pieces of text, such as blog articles, into brief 1-2 sentence long reports, suitable for posting on social media. The shortened versions are adjusted to each social media platform, according to the platform’s rules and character limit. If you’re searching for AI systems to automate your social media management, HubSpot, Cortex, Social Bakers, and Lately are great solutions.
Content Creation and Optimization
Content creation requires two main skills: creativity and strong research ability. While AI may lack the former, it certainly possesses the latter. The computerized intellect’s impressive capacity to run thorough research in a very short time has led people to wonder if AI would be a skilled content writer.
Before you exclaim it’s impossible for a robot to produce coherent, eloquent writing, let us convince you otherwise with this snippet from an article written entirely by AI:
Of course, the human language is intricate and nuanced, and it takes far more than basic knowledge of grammar to create rich, engaging content. For this very reason, we can’t yet fully rely on Machine Learning algorithms to write lengthy articles and reports. Aside from written content, we also have the visual kind. Renderforest uses AI to translate text into a logo or video. Our video maker allows you to type your script, which will then be converted into a video with the scenes and characters you described.
AI-based tools have proven to be quite helpful with content optimization as well. Analysing the top search results on a specific topic, AI will make suggestions on how to improve your content for search engines. Clearscope is a great example of content optimization software powered by AI. Persado is a program that learns your brand voice and generates text and images for social ads. Other tools that can come in handy during content planning and creation are Acrolinx, Concured, Phrasee, and many more.
Tracking Online Behaviour
Recognizing and tracking patterns is AI’s superpower. It can collect and provide you with invaluable data about user browsing habits, average time on site, bounce rates, clicks, views, and so on. Once all the numbers are laid out in front of you, it’ll be much easier to identify why your visitors leave, which parts of your website or social media account work and which ones need tuning. It’s critical to be aware of the buying behavior of different segments of your target audience, especially if your following is large or diverse. You can then tailor your marketing message to each customer group and increase your chances of grabbing their attention and establishing a stronger connection. Linkfluence is a useful tool that gives you social insights, helps analyze and segment your audience, and tracks what customers or competitors say about your business online.
Targeted Advertising
One of the most frequent uses of Artificial Intelligence is in advertising. Gaining access to the metadata that hosts all the necessary information about your clients’ demographics and preferences, you can then modify your marketing campaigns and deliver them to the right audience.
Various AI and deep learning tools can help to monitor the performance of ad campaigns and stay up to date with niche industry trends. Competitor research and analysis are also infinitely easier and more effective with AI. As mentioned earlier, modern tools can also write social ads already optimized for better CTR and higher conversion. When a well-thought-out ad meets the right demographic — with the assistance of AI — magic happens. And by magic, we mean conversions and sales. Pattern89 allows you to test out ads before you run them. This is a great way to save resources on marketing campaigns that would not yield the desired results. Software like WordStream and SEMrush help to analyze and optimize campaigns.
Automated Customer Service
Responding to every customer query right away is a challenge for many businesses. But with the automation of certain aspects of customer service, clients get quicker responses, and companies gain their customers’ trust. Obviously, not all customer inquiries can be settled by a chatbot. Instead, identifying the most commonly asked questions and telling a programmed virtual assistant how to respond to those can be of great aid in customer support.
Below you can see how Lyft uses automated assistance on Facebook Messenger to help customers request a ride online. Spotify, Airbnb, Sephora, and many others have also employed automated assistants to facilitate customer support. It’s safe to assume that we’ll see more and more companies join the trend in the near future. With the growth of Natural Language Processing, algorithms are now capable of sentiment analysis. The latter refers to identifying subjective sentiments such as emotions in written content. Sentiment analysis helps to monitor public opinion and customer feedback to detect negative experiences with a business. Not only does this allow the business to understand customers better, but also helps to find and address any possible issues with its products or services. If you’re looking for sentiment analysis services, Google Cloud NLP and IBM Watson are great options to consider. LivePerson offers chatbots and messaging tools to converse with customers in real-time.
Final Thoughts
As Artificial Intelligence continues to progress day by day, its impact on our lives becomes more tangible. Businesses have already started reaping the benefits of this leading-edge technology to improve their online image, marketing campaigns, customer service, and more.
The social marketing game has been strongly affected by the emergence of intelligent machines and algorithms that have the ability to learn on their own. AI has enabled social media marketers to create optimized posts, monitor social engagement more closely, target the right audience with personalized ads, and so forth.
Of course, Artificial Intelligence has its downsides as well, and privacy issues are one of the main ones. But whether the advantages overpower the disadvantages or not is up to each and every one of us to decide.
