The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in social media, however, is being criticized by others. The people who approve state AI can be more creative and come up with new ideas because it allows them to accomplish their tasks more quickly. Many people are concerned that artificial intelligence may not work properly or may even take over jobs people want to do.
The reality is, AI is already being utilized extensively. According to a study, 80% of social media workers are utilizing AI to assist them with writing or post planning.
It’s possible that you are lagging behind if you are still doing everything the traditional way, without any AI assistance. With the help of artificial intelligence, individuals are discovering faster, better ways to do their work.
But don’t forget: AI is only an assistant.There will never be a substitute for the knowledge of humans who can make brilliant posts, craft excellent stories, or paint entertaining images. A team is still incomplete without humans!
11 smart ways to use AI in social media
Today, when folks refer to AI, they generally refer to generative AI—software such as ChatGPT that can assist in producing content such as text, images, or videos. And yes, producing content is a major reason why several use AI on social media.
However, that is not the extent of what AI can do.
Actually, AI can aid your social media efforts in numerous other intelligent ways. In this article, we’ll see 11 awesome ways to apply AI tools beyond content creation—enabling you and your team to work smarter, quicker, and more efficiently online.
1. Analyze and summarize large data sets
With social media, there is virtually no limit to the amount of data that can be created – far more than any human being could possibly examine or analyze.
AI algorithms will assist you in locating the data you need in order to inform your social media strategy. AI models can make massive amounts of analytics data meaningful by translating them into clear-cut forecasts that you can use in planning campaigns backed by actual data that gives maximum ROI. With AI models, you are able to obtain insight into anything ranging from topic on content to demographic and audience segments to post timings.
AI tools can examine and distill in-house data sets as well. That includes anything from transcripts of meetings to technical whitepapers to compendia of notes compiled from various stakeholders.
2. Analyze your industry niche and identify strategic gaps
This might be included in the above tip, as industry and competitor analysis entails the analysis of big and complicated data sets. But this is a significant strategy that we wanted to highlight separately.
“When a new client consigned, I conducted industry and audience research with Perplexity Deep Research,” says Sixth City Marketing’s SEO director, Brian Gorman. “Then, prior to suggesting strategy, I scan the previous 6-12 months of social posts from the client on ChatGPT. It’s a great thing to do for a competitor research tool.”
It would not be possible to analyze a whole year’s worth of social posts without AI tools. But with AI, you can see patterns that enable you to understand the overall picture and extremely detailed information. AI social listening and sentiment analysis tools such as Talkwalker can even enable you to forecast KPIs 90 days ahead with a high level of accuracy and identify trends before they reach critical mass.
As you broaden your research, you will also learn more about your competitors’ marketing campaigns and the voice of the consumer that can lead to recognizing gaps in strategy in the marketplace. This is far beyond social content creation and can circle back to your product development, R&D, and customer service teams.
3. Identify and craft content for specific audience segments
Again, this might be dumped into large data set analysis, but here the trick is recognizing what the AI tools are indicating and performing the very human tasks to generate specific social content.
“AI-powered audience segmentation cut our content planning time by 50% last quarter, explained Ashwin Thapliyal, Exemplifi marketing head.” We utilized it to segment out niche buyer personas for a B2B client in logistics and then develop targeted LinkedIn campaigns that generated a 20% lead generation increase.
AI is so valuable because it can segment audiences to a much deeper level than software that does not use machine learning, delivering actual insights that enable you to produce content that resonates specifically with the potential customer’s needs.
4. Allow for hyper-personalization in social ads
You can push personalization even further with the AI capabilities integrated into the ad platforms at several social networks. Instead of developing a single ad campaign for a target group, these tools deliver dynamic ad content personalized in real-time at the individual user level.
“We had an SaaS customer where we deployed AI-based segmentation within Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and employed ChatGPT to adjust content in real-time,” states Peter Lewis, chief marketing officer, Strategic Pete.
“Rather than publishing five different ad versions, we published hundreds, each of which varies depending on the user’s history of interaction,” said Lewis. “If someone viewed 75% of a video ad without clicking, they received a follow-up with a case study carousel versus the same video. If they bounced 10 seconds after visiting the site, they received a product demo video with a ‘See It In Action’ CTA.”
To put this in context, over four million consumers are currently employing at least one AI advertising tool on Meta platforms, doubling from one million six months ago.
5. Repurpose long-form content for social media
Hootsuite’s own research indicates that on all platforms, the majority of brands need to post between 48 and 72 times a week. That’s A LOT of content, and it sounds implausible to come up with that many original ideas each week.
With AI tools, however, you don’t need to generate that many ideas for social content.
Your company probably has a rich library of brand content for you to tap into. What that looks like will be based on what type of company you work for. Perhaps it’s a back catalog of very technical equipment specifications. Perhaps it’s a video library of your CEO or CMO giving speeches at industry conferences.
Whatever shape your internal knowledge base takes, it’s a treasure trove for social content creation. Tools like the AI content generation tool OwlyWriter AI can scan a given document for analysis, then convert it into an on-brand social caption (or social video script) to the specifications of any given social platform.
It will even generate hashtags to help get your content seen. Whenever you’re creating a post in Composer, Hootsuite’s AI technology will recommend a custom set of hashtags based on your draft — the tool analyzes both your caption and the images you’ve uploaded to suggest the most relevant tags.
6. Creative brainstorming and idea generation
What if you don’t have a vast library of brand content? Perhaps you’re a new brand, or you’re introducing a new product line with no prior documentation? Or perhaps you simply need some ideas to fill the portion of your content calendar that isn’t all about you?
Keep in mind: Hootsuite suggests an 80-20 split in your content mix, with 80% of your posts utilized to teach, entertain, and inform your audience and only 20% dedicated to actively promoting your brand.
Insert some applicable keywords or broad topic categories into an AI tool such as OwlyWriter AI to create new ideas for articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and more–all from what’s currently trending in your niche.
7. Generate alt text
Alt text is an important component of social SEO. It’s also critical for improving the accessibility of your social content.
Unfortunately, it can also be easy to ignore, since it’s not as glamorous as social captions.
If you’re hesitant about using AI tools to draft social content, alt text is a low-risk place to start.
“AI can be super helpful in drafting alt-text for images, even if you’re skeptical about writing an entire caption” says Hanna Gbordzoe, vice president of social media at Development Counsellors International.
Try using AI tools to create alt text for images in your web content, too.
8. Draft briefs or proofs of concept
There’s usually a lot of paperwork to prepare before you even begin writing posts for a social campaign.
AI tools are excellent assistants for activities such as writing briefs, writing a pitch deck, or writing rough copy and graphic ideas to conceptualize a campaign before engaging the copy and graphics experts.
This is an excellent, low-resource method to get feedback and hone your ideas before they hit the live wire.
9. Design (or iterate) custom graphics
Content sourcing is perhaps the largest bottleneck for social media managers and marketers. You need to discover and create visuals that match your brand aesthetic, then reformat them for every platform.
AI image design and creation tools such as Midjourney, Dall-E, DreamStudio, and even Canva can assist you in creating custom, branded visuals in an instant.
For instance, Midjourney is capable of generating unique images from pictures, video footage, GIFs, text overlays, sketches, and the like.
On that note, just as you would prefer having human work in the text creation, the best outputs will come when human graphic expert’s involved.
Below is a workflow that has worked perfectly for Hootsuite:
Humans develop a concept design for a campaign and later use AI-based tools to prepare mock-ups
A photographer or graphic designer produces visual content for the campaign
AI tools are used by the team to produce extra assets in the same style
Humans retouch the assets to ensure that they are perfect
10. Plan and optimize your content calendar
We said earlier that most brands should be making 28 to 72 social updates a week. Here’s how that plays out on the various platforms:
Since most of your audience will be following you on multiple platforms, it’s an art form to space
out your content to reach the maximum number of people and keep them engaged without inducing too much viewer fatigue.
Tools such as Hootsuite Analytics can be a big assistance in this regard, as they leverage data from your previous outcomes according to your choice of metrics to recommend the best times for subsequent posts.
“Hootsuite’s AI provides optimal posting time and topics, reducing our scheduling time by 60%,” said Thapliyal of Exemplifi. ”
Whereas before, it would take us a day, now it takes us two hours, freeing up energy for our team to focus on strategy.”
11. Streamline social media customer service
Chatbots have been an essential AI-driven tool for social customer service for a long time. But AI raises customer service automation to a different level.
Instead of responding to FAQs with a generic response, AI chatbots learn as time passes, and therefore can respond to as much as 80% of reply messages. Hootsuite’s AI chatbot creates responses based on a pre-approved knowledge base, in your brand voice.
AI chatbots are also able to work in various languages, and build specific regional knowledge.