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How To Use AI To Help Your Brand’s Social Media Marketing

By Amanda Nielsen
October 30, 2024





Lately, anywhere you turn you can see a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool launching. From image generation to chatbots, AI is unavoidable. Whether they’ve only asked ChatGPT to write them an email or help automate their entire workflow, a Foundation study discovered over 84% of surveyed marketing professionals have used AI in the workplace. 

The most common use? Content generation. Rendering images, writing copy, analyzing consumer data, and so many other jobs are becoming easier to automate. This proves especially useful for the fast-paced, customer insight-based world of social media marketing. Here are some ways to leverage AI for your brand’s social media marketing.

Understanding AI in Social Media

At its core, AI is the use of computer programs to perform tasks and learn from data in ways that mimic human thought patterns. Social media algorithms were one of the first places AI technology was employed, using it to analyze your data and deliver content you’re interested in. 

As a brand, using AI for social media can automate repetitive tasks, analyze vast amounts of data, and create personalized experiences all at the click of a button. This allows your company to focus on developing strategies based on these analytics and delivering tailored content to your audience, similar to how algorithms deliver tailored content to users.

AI Tools For Content Creation

Generative AI tools are reshaping the way brands are able to create content for social media, producing immediate and relevant ideas, copy and visuals. Perhaps the most important generation tools are Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, which enable brands to automate their written content. Among these are a plethora of free AI tools for social media content creation: ChatGPT can generate an outline for a blog, while CopyAI can write you a month’s worth of social media captions, hashtags and all. These algorithms can also be used on already-created content, simplifying a tech report into a few sentences or creating a whole marketing campaign out of a simple tagline. 

Content generation has moved far beyond just writing copy, too. Midjourney has been at the forefront of image generation for over a year and has reached the point that it can create photorealistic visuals. Canva, formerly a graphic design program, has launched a variety of AI tools, including video generation from text complete with AI voiceovers. Lumen5 offers a similar text to video program, allowing even people with no experience to create content concepts, and Speechelo converts text to speech in a variety of languages. If there’s something you need to create, odds are there’s now an AI tool to help you do it.

The benefits of AI in social media are undeniable – these tools can push your social content forward at a previously impossible rate, but it’s vital to remember that the human element is still necessary for the final pass on anything AI generated. The models can make mistakes from incorrect information to uncanny renders, meaning that content should never be posted without first being checked. Additionally, copyright laws are still uncertain on content created by AI since the models are trained off existing content, so generative tools are better used for brainstorming and mockups than the final product. At least for right now, there’s still no replacement for the human touch.

One of the areas AI shines in content creation is by optimizing the tasks that have already been automated. Social media managers have been able to schedule posts for years, but automated analytic tools like Buffer and Hootsuite have revolutionized that simple process. Now, posts can be scheduled based on optimal posting times, and the same service used to schedule the post can then be used to analyze the posts’ metrics in order to further optimize the scheduling and other choices for next time.

AI for Analytics and Insight

When it comes to processing the massive amount of data that makes up your social media analytics, AI is unbeatable. Its analysis of statistics from engagement to conversion allows marketers to see patterns, correlations and anomalies on every item posted to social media. This enhances the precision of customer segmentation and targeting, and permits real-time insights into customer behaviors and market trends. With AI tools like Sprout Social or Emplifi, insights that may have taken a month of posting can now be discovered and acted on after a week, or even a single post. This enables your social media team to be immediately reactive and constantly improving their strategy. 

But these programs are capable of more than just interpreting your data for you. Machine learning algorithms, a main component of AI, are capable of processing vast datasets and identifying intricate patterns within them. This is especially useful in predicting market trends, enabling marketers to predict emerging market segments and changes in the preferences of their consumer base, and in competitive landscapes. Through historical data and real-time inputs, AI forecasting allows your social media strategy to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating consumers’ tastes instead of playing catch-up.

AI for Customer Engagement

It’s now possible to offer 24/7 customer service on your brand’s social media accounts thanks to AI chatbots. These bots can be trained on past customer queries and customer data in order to create a personalized experience based on your brand. When customers reach out on a social media platform, they can now receive an immediate response instead of waiting hours or days. ChatGPT offers the ability to create a specific chat model that can then be integrated into your social media messaging account, allowing customers to describe their problems in a more detailed way rather than clicking a button that describes their issue. Services like Drift and Intercom offer similar services, providing a first line of support that can often resolve issues customers would be reaching out about on social media before an employee has to handle them. However, note that it’s important to be careful with the implementation of these chatbots as the internet is full of examples of savvy customers tricking the bot into stepping outside of the brand’s guidelines.

As part of developing a brand, it’s vital to be aware of what the public thinks of said brand. There’s likely no place where more of that information can be found than social media, but it’s nearly impossible to have your social media team present on every corner of social media constantly. Opinions will slip by people, but they don’t slip by AI social listening tools. Services like Brandwatch use machine learning to analyze data from across the internet in order to keep a finger on the pulse of your consumer base, even when the opinions are in different languages. This consistent monitoring enables your brand’s social media presence to pivot immediately if necessary, customize your messaging, and refine your products and services based on what people are saying about them. This social consumer awareness is one of the easiest ways for your social team to bolster the brand’s reputation.

AI in Advertising

Just as AI models got their start in tailoring individual users’ feeds to their tastes, you can utilize them to tailor your social media marketing to different sections of your consumer base. Traditional customer segmentation methods often rely on broad demographic categories, but machine learning algorithms are able to quickly analyze your entire social media reach network, even finding potential new customers by identifying patterns and correlations that human analysts could only sometimes unearth. This allows your social team to create dynamic and highly granular audience segments based on their engagement with your brand’s presence, their consumer preferences, and more. 

AI’s role in audience segmentation can empower modern marketers to move beyond static categorizations, unlocking the potential for more precise targeting. Not only can your existing audience be targeted, advertising to people using predictions of their future behavior is made possible by machine learning programs, which expands your social media’s reach like never before. By continuously analyzing customer data, AI enables social media marketers to deliver more relevant and personalized content, promotions and communications, fostering stronger connections with their audiences. 

This customer segmentation isn’t just useful for natural social engagement. Using tools like Facebook’s Ad Manager, your paid ads can be just as optimally targeted based on user data, showing different potential customers the variation of the advertisement that their data indicates they would most resonate with. This allows your brand to get a significantly greater return on investment for their social advertising dollars than they would by running generic ads. 

Examples of AI in social media advertising don’t just take place behind the scenes. In the early days of text to image generation, Heinz launched a social campaign asking followers to suggest ketchup-based prompts, demonstrating that the model consistently gave bottles that looked like Heinz. From there they launched a massive multimedia campaign utilizing these unique images and solidifying their status as a legacy brand in a new age. It demonstrated the potential of AI to involve previously unskilled individuals in the creative process, and still stands as an example of how social marketing is just scratching the surface of what’s possible utilizing AI and social media.

Implementing AI into Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

From content generation to consumer analytics, new AI tools offer nearly limitless potential for social media marketing, but the best results come when they’re paired with human creativity and social marketing expertise — exactly what we do here at Joybyte. We have a team of highly skilled, experienced professionals using all the latest tools, including AI, in order to help our clients put together effective social media strategies, reaching the right customers, boosting your brand awareness, and helping you grow your online presence.  

Want to learn more about how your brand can benefit from optimizing your social media marketing? Read some of our other blog posts to bring your social media presence into the modern day. If you want to launch your brand to the next level, contact us today to see how our team of social marketing experts can help.


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