More and more users are getting on board each day. That means the volume of potential consumers to target as well as the volume of competing businesses to monitor keeps increasing steadily. Businesses, therefore, jump through hoops to leverage social media effectively in order to keep their audience engaged, gain new leads, and build their brand image along the way. What if there was a secret formula that could maximize your output and make social media an easier beast to tackle? 

The name of this secret formula is artificial intelligence. Yes, the term you are probably hearing in your sleep. In this blog, let’s delve into the concept of using AI in social media marketing. What parts of social media marketing can AI help improve? What kinds of tools can you use to implement these benefits? We’ll cover all these one by one. 

Social media – the X-factor in marketing lately 

To understand why AI in social media marketing is a topic worth your time, let’s quickly go over the state of social media marketing. 

The first and most essential fact to know is that as of 2023, there are more than 4.74 billion social media users around the world. That’s roughly about 60% of the world’s population. No wonder social media makes a worthy platform to focus on considering the massive audience group you can reach through it. 

Data shows that on a global scale, the time spent on social media per day averages to 2 hours and 28 minutes. Brands are therefore keen on spending more time and money creating content for the channel where their target audiences are spending a huge chunk of time. 

Besides these statistics, the mere fact that breaking the ice and initiating conversations with your consumers feels much simpler on social media than on most other platforms gives you enough reasons to spend more time drafting a strong social media strategy. 

Now that the marketing landscape has shifted and brands are investing heavily in AI technology, leveraging the tech in social media makes perfect sense. Because one of the biggest strengths of AI is its ability to effortlessly handle large volumes of data and boost analytics. Both of these are trump cards in social media marketing. 

Therefore, knowing that social media is an indispensable entity in your marketing strategy, one way to make this better will be to use AI in social media marketing. 

AI in social media marketing – 7 benefits you cannot overlook 

1. Improved lead generation through social media 

Lead generation is one of the crucial areas of focus for many marketers when they venture into social media marketing. The use of AI in social media can be particularly felt with the ability to automate lead generation and ability to deliver better results over time. 

We’ll explain this with an example. What’s the first main challenge you face in lead generation? Finding relevant leads, right? What if you could automate the process of identifying the right leads based on interests, behaviors, interactions, and other user metrics? And then the outreach also happens in autopilot mode? That’s pretty much the kind of convenience that AI in social media marketing brings. 

Seamless.ai is a good example of an AI marketing tool that leverages social media for improved lead generation. 

The Autopilot feature on Seamless.ai lets you build lists for outreach. The tool uses AI to process real-time data to understand your customers better and therefore target only the most relevant ones. This tool is particularly handy for B2B businesses looking to leverage platforms like LinkedIn for lead generation.

Tools like these help businesses experience the benefits of AI in social media in the form of improved and automated lead generation and lead nurturing activities. 

2. Enhance customer conversations on social media 

One of the main reasons brands incorporate social media into their marketing plan is that it simplifies two-way conversations. Yes, the chatbot on your website counts. But that’s for customers who make time to leave the social media platform they are currently browsing and visit your website. But that does not happen often.

Part of ensuring customer convenience involves ensuring that your customers do not have to switch between apps to find answers. So, if they discover your brand on social media, they are more likely to make that first contact with your brand right there. In other words, they are more likely to visit your brand page on that social media platform rather than visit your website. 

Therefore, if they have queries, they message your brand on that social media platform. Moreover, about 40% of consumers who reach out to brands on social media expect responses within the first hour. You can set standard automated responses but those do not offer the much-needed human touch to the customer experience. 

That’s where AI-powered chatbots for social media can be a big plus. ManyChat is one such tool that lets businesses streamline messages across various social media platforms and provide customers with timely and relevant responses. 

For example, if you create a lead capture campaign on social media where customers will be given access to an ebook on replying to a story, ManyChat helps automate the process. This way when there is a large volume of customers reaching out to download the ebook, you do not have to manually respond to them, collect their email ids and mail them the ebook. The tool does it for you. 

Similarly, instant responses and automation of chat-based workflows become simpler with the use of AI in social media marketing. 

3. AI in social media to fine-tune your content strategy 

What kind of content should you post? What kind of objectives should you set for your content on social media? Should you focus on entertaining your audience or educating them? A lot of such questions bother social media marketers around the world. Because content creation takes time, effort, and a huge portion of your marketing budget as well. 

One of the biggest perks of AI in social media marketing is its ability to help improve content strategy. In other words, you can use AI to gain insights into the types of content based on current trends, historical customer reactions, and other parameters. 

For example, in a survey conducted by Dash Hudson and NielsenIQ, it was found that brands using entertainment as the content strategy grow 34% faster than those that don’t. 

Dash Hudson is one such AI-powered tool that helps brands around the world revisit their social media content strategy in a more effective and data-backed way. 

Dash Hudson is a creative intelligence tool that lets brands analyze their creatives and identify the ones that perform best. Based on these insights planning your future creatives for social media becomes so much simpler. You know the kind of content to focus on and the kind of content to invest in. 

Brands like Kylie Cosmetics have used Dash Hudson to continuously gather actionable insights on their social media content. 

For example, if you see that a particular type of video posts seem to be performing better than others consistently, you can invest in a long-term video design solution like say an unlimited video design subscription and keep posting engaging videos on your brand pages. 

4. Sentiment analysis for fine-tuning customer experience 

With traditional social listening tools, you can capture all the instances where your brand is mentioned on social media. You can record conversations about your brand. But a hint of AI is just what you need to process these conversations and gauge the sentiments in them. 

Though the idea might sound futuristic, we now have tools with advanced natural language processing capabilities built into them. And therefore, this idea of using AI for analyzing conversations and understanding the sentiments in them is totally doable. 

Brandwatch is one of the most popular social media listening tools used to monitor and improve social media strategies. Emotional Analysis is one of the most critical capabilities of this tool. The tool segregates audience conversations on social media into six simple emotions. 

With these tools, you can monitor sentiments over your brand, a particular product, or even your competitors. What can you do with this data? We’ll give you a few use cases. 

• If you are working on a product strategy, knowing whether customers feel positively or negatively about your product can be a huge input. That helps your product teams save a lot of time otherwise spent in experimenting. 
• When you notice negative conversations about your competitors, you know the gaps that your brand can fill. You can then create content to show your customers how your brand does things differently in these aspects. 

5. Create better converting social media ads 

Social media advertising has been growing at the rate of 25% YoY and is now the most popular advertising channel even ahead of paid search. Better ROI and a wider reach are some of the reasons brands continue to heavily invest in social media ads. And we’re sure your social media marketing strategy also includes paid ad campaigns.

One of the ways to use AI in social media is to identify the right ad strategies. 

Revealbot is a popular AI-powered tool that helps automate your social media advertising workflow across various social media platforms. If setting the right bids and identifying the right budget for your ad spends have always been the biggest challenges, Revealbot uses AI to change that. 

Some of the things you can do include: 

• Automatically test different versions of the same ad to identify the right strategy for the best engagement and conversions. 
• Analyze user data to help create your ad strategies. 
• Identify low-performing ads and help save the money spent on ads that don’t convert as expected. 

For example, Scentbird, a designer fragrance brand was able to use Revealbot to reduce about 76% of the budget spent on zero-conversion ads. 

Without AI, you wait for your ad performance reports to come, and then based on the results, you modify the bids, prioritize ads and take down those that don’t perform well, manually. All this can be automated with AI. As you can see, you still have full control over the kind of rules you set but you get to save time and act immediately. 

6. Gain better audience insights 

From the quality of content you post to the type of objectives you set for your social media strategy, several things change when you have strong audience insights. When you know more about the people who visit your brand page, the ones that follow your page and engage with your account you can create better content. This includes details about the accounts your audience follows, the kinds of posts they interact with, the kind of content they share, the keywords and brands they talk about, and so on. 

In other words, when you know what makes your audience tick, you can create content that’s in line with their interests. Making this happen is one of the strengths of AI in social media marketing. 

SparkToro is one such tool that uses AI to help brands gauge their audience’s likes and dislikes and therefore create content that resonates with them. 

You can search for sections in your audience that often talk about a particular topic, or use particular hashtags, or even follows specific accounts. This lets you segment your audience group into meaningful groups for a more targeted ad campaign, for example. 

That’s one way to use AI in social media to identify topics and trends that influence your audience. 

7. Content creation and scheduling 

One of the most evident roles played by AI in social media marketing is something you probably hear about all the time. This is also probably one functionality you’ve tried yourself by now. Especially with everyone talking about ChatGPT, Jasper.ai, and Copy.ai and how these tools can quickly create copies for your campaigns! 

Yes, language models, generative AI tools like these can create copy based on the context and requirements you provide. If you are facing writer’s block while writing your social media post captions, or if you do not have the budget to hire a copywriter for the job, these tools can save the day. 

But remember that there tend to be redundancies and the tone of voice in the copy generated by these might not exactly be on-brand all the time. You might need to tweak your copy to align it with your brand. But at least, you have a base to work with. 

To further simplify your workflow there are some copy-generation tools that also allow you to schedule posts directly once your copy is ready. Postly is one such tool that lets you create content for social media and publish or schedule them. The tool also lets you identify and populate relevant hashtags for the post, create shortened links for better tracking and analytics features to see how your posts are performing. 

AI in social media – the future looks bright 

The role of AI in marketing is expanding as we speak. Brands are identifying creative ways to use AI to improve their marketing strategies across various platforms. And social media in particular, is evolving to be a complicated mix of audience engagement and brand messaging. So, brands appreciate all the help they can get to reduce the time and effort that goes into crafting social media strategies, creating content and managing them. 

AI tools, as you can see from the above list, are able to give a hand in almost every step along the way. Some of them also come as comprehensive solutions where everything from ideation to content creation and analytics can be performed in one place. Hence now is a good time to explore the many ways to use AI in social media marketing. 

With your brilliant strategy in place, all you need is the right visuals to carry your idea forward. And that’s where the Kimp team can help. You get unlimited designs that include all kinds of social media graphics as well as promotional graphics for other platforms including print. 

Want to see how an unlimited design subscription can help your business grow and scale? Sign up for a free trial today.