Using AI for social media marketing isn’t just about adding AI tools to your marketing tech stack. It’s more about how you leverage AI tools to drive meaningful conversations.
When most people think of AI in social media marketing, they’re picturing chatbots answering customer questions or tools that schedule posts for you. Those are great examples, but they’re only a slice of AI’s potential.
AI has the power to not only handle tasks, but also optimize them. It can come up with ideas and bring them to life. It can tell you the best times to post and why. This extra context and clarity helps social media marketers feel confident about what they’re doing and trust they’re moving in the right direction.
Here’s how to use AI in social media marketing and real examples of brands applying AI in their strategies.
Contents:
What Is AI in Social Media Marketing?
What Are the Benefits of Using AI in Social Media Marketing?
5 Ways to Use AI in Social Media Marketing
Examples of Brands Using AI in Social Media Marketing
Ethical Challenges of AI in Social Media Marketing
Using Meltwater for AI in Social Media Marketing
What Is AI in Social Media Marketing?
We define AI in social media marketing as the intentional use of AI tools to handle specific parts of a social media strategy.
Artificial intelligence refers to machines and algorithms that can mimic human-like "thinking". This means they’re good for more than just repetitive tasks. AI can review large sets of data in seconds, then make predictions based on the data to deliver optimal outcomes.
Applied to social media marketing, AI has the ability to:
- Read and write content
- Analyze engagement data and compare it to things like posting times and content formats
- Understand the context of content
- Identify your target audience and their shared characteristics
- Analyze the sentiments of what’s being said online
- Detect images, videos, and facial expressions in content
- Predict content performance based on historical data
- Make suggestions for new content or how to optimize existing content
- Recommend potential influencers to partner with
This is just the tip of the AI iceberg. As AI tools grow in sophistication and learn from its predictions, AI’s accuracy will improve over time. And as AI gets better, marketers will find more ways to use them in their social media strategies.
TIP: Download our Ultimate Guide to AI for Social Media Management to get more tips, tricks, and AI prompts that will refine your strategies and make you more efficient!
What Are the Benefits of Using AI in Social Media Marketing?
AI in social media marketing doesn’t replace your human marketers, but it can make them more informed, productive, and even creative.
When applied strategically, AI for social media marketing can offer the following benefits:
- Scalable content in seconds. AI can generate captions, hashtags, and entire social posts quickly without spending hours brainstorming or A/B testing.
- Real-time sentiment analysis. AI social listening tools can monitor and analyze millions of conversations in real time to better understand who your audience is, what they’re talking about, and how they feel about those topics.
- Predictive analytics for a better strategy. By forecasting trends based on historical data, AI can optimize post times to help you reach more people.
- Deeper connections with your audience. AI can analyze large amounts of audience data to find your best customers and most engaged followers so you can create content that resonates with them.
- Better ad performance (and less ad spend waste). AI-powered ads analyze performance in real time and can adjust bids, targets, and creative elements to deliver better results.
- Automated brand tracking. Use AI to keep your brand in check by finding clone accounts, negative feedback, brand mentions, and other opportunities to improve or protect your presence.
These benefits allow marketers to go from insights to action in less time. They have a clearer idea of who their audience is and what they respond to, paving the way for better content that makes an impact.
5 Ways to Use AI in Social Media Marketing
As AI grows its footprint in social media marketing, marketers have a healthy curiosity about how to best use AI tools to streamline their work. Here are five ideas to inspire the way you use AI in social media marketing.
1. Create written, audio, and video content using AI tools
ChatGPT was just the beginning for using AI in marketing. There are tons of AI tools that can help with all types of content creation, including images, videos, and audio recordings.
For example, tools like Creatopy, InVideo, and Kling can generate text-to-video content. Use it to turn blog posts into videos or input a video script and watch your AI to go to work.
DALL-E, which is built into ChatGPT, can generate images based on text inputs. You can also use Blaze or Instasize to create images for your social channels. Canva also has an AI image generator built into its platform.
Murf AI and Revoicer can provide life-life voiceovers for your videos or podcasts. You can specify the voice type and emotion to create on-brand audio content.
AI can support every phase of the content creation process, from coming up with ideas to creating the actual content. AI isn’t perfect, nor is it human, so these tools aren’t likely to replace your human creators. But they can help to support their work and generate first drafts or supplementary content so you can publish faster and more frequently.
2. Analyze social media performance
Your social media analytics can tell tons of stories about your audience, and AI can help you surface those stories and make sense of them.
Every view, click, comment, and share ends up in your social media analytics. AI excels in putting the pieces together to tell a complete story about your content and performance. You’ll not only have the metrics but also know what they mean — and more importantly, what you should do next to improve your outcomes.
Social media insight tools like Meltwater can monitor your social performance over time. Find common threads between content and get a more informed idea of what’s working and what isn’t in your strategy.
3. Personalize your social media targeting
Personalizing content on social media isn’t about addressing followers by name. When you get to know your audience on a deeper level, you can create content that speaks one-to-one with your audience (or at least appears to).
AI analyzes how users interact with your content and groups them into segments. These segments might focus on shared interests, behaviors, location, or buying patterns, for example. This allows you to deliver highly relevant messages to specific segments that they’re most likely to engage with.
TIP: For more information on how you can personalize your strategies for your audience, check out our Guide to Personalization at Scale.
4. Use AI-powered social listening
Social listening lets your brand be everywhere on social media, all at once. You can tap into conversations involving your brands, products, services, celebrities, or even your target audience to learn what’s on people’s minds.
AI drives social listening by adding context to content. Using AI, you can learn not only what people are discussing, but also how they’re discussing it. This helps you move beyond “black and white” topics and get deep into the gray areas, learning what really makes your audience tick.
AI-powered social listening like Meltwater can also prove useful in understanding complicated elements of conversations. For example, dialects and vernacular can vary by region. AI tools can pick up on these differences and synthesize them accordingly, and even wade through grammatical errors and misspellings without losing context.
5. Implement AI-powered customer service
Your audience is using social media around the clock, often as a customer service channel for the brands they buy from. AI customer service tools can be the always-on assistant they need, even when it’s after business hours.
A quick response can help you shape your image as a responsive, people-first company. Whether it’s greeting someone after a DM or providing self-service resources based on common questions, AI-powered customer service lets you respond to more people in less time without losing that personal touch.
Chatbots can provide human-like responses and ensure every introduction is on brand. For questions or cases that a chatbot can’t handle, you can set up alerts to have a human take over as soon as possible. It’s a win/win for you and your followers, ensuring you never miss a chance to engage.
Examples of Brands Using AI in Social Media Marketing
To put AI in social media marketing into context, it helps to look at a few social media marketing examples from real companies.
Here are some examples that are specific to AI.
Buzzfeed’s AI-driven personalized quizzes
Buzzfeed thrives on fun quizzes that feel personal and magical, and they’re adding an extra layer of personalization with AI. With AI, every quiz becomes a truly one of a kind experience tailored to every quiz taker and their responses.
Buzzfeed’s AI assistant “Buzzy the Robot” uses your unique quiz answers to generate personalized results. In true Buzzfeed fashion, the AI quizzes cover a huge range of topics, from crafting the perfect New Year’s resolution to figuring out your most toxic traits.
Quizzes are super shareable on social media and tend to drive tons of engagement.
Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” campaign
Coca-Cola uses AI by encouraging their fanbase to take AI for a test drive — to the brand’s benefit, of course. The “Create Real Magic” campaign uses the brand’s own AI platform, where customers can create their own versions of Coca-Cola products and artwork.
Once completed, customers could share their submissions with the brand for a chance to be featured on billboards. With multiple submissions, Coca-Cola collected plenty of user-generated content they could repurpose for their social channels, too.
Mastercard’s microtrends
Some trends come and go so quickly you don’t realize they were trends. But brands who are paying attention can jump on a short-lived bandwagon and use it to get in front of their audiences — even if it’s just for a moment.
Mastercard uses AI to find these “microtrends” before they go mainstream. The company built its own digital engine to predict and identify these trends, which combs through billions of conversations happening all over the world, paying attention to the smallest moments that define their customers’ lives.
Whether it’s a new type of sushi or outrage over a local restaurant closing, the digital engine surfaces conversations that Mastercard can repurpose in its social marketing.
Ethical Challenges of AI in Social Media Marketing
With new technologies and processes come new considerations, particularly in the way of ethics.
Transparency is among the biggest ethical challenges. With AI doing some of the heavy lifting, marketers wonder how transparent they need to be about whether their content is AI-generated or how they’re using AI.
Many people are wary of AI and don’t fully trust it. When creating content, marketers should keep this in mind to avoid eroding trust with their audience and damaging their brand image.
Other common ethical challenges with AI in social media marketing include:
- The presence of unintended bias
- Privacy concerns
- Accountability for what AI models create
- Potential job displacement for human employees
- Responsible use of data and information
To overcome these and other challenges, marketers can create a set of ethics guidelines and principles that detail how they intend to use AI.
Meltwater’s AI principles discuss how we address specific areas of concern, including alignment, bias and fairness, and interpretability. Having clear guidelines can help marketers address questions about AI and keep human AI users accountable.
Using Meltwater for AI in Social Media Marketing
Meltwater responsibly uses AI-powered marketing tools to help brands win bigger on social media. AI-driven social listening insights work across all of your channels, helping you capture the fine nuances of conversations that matter.
AI analyzes sentiments, learns about your customers and competitors, and turns numbers into meaningful insights and action steps.
You can use your social listening findings to power your social strategies. Meltwater’s AI social media scheduling tools centralize your posts and help you optimize everything from subjects to send times. Engage your customers at the source and never miss an opportunity to connect.
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