Artificial intelligence is making it more efficient than ever to market on social media. Social media platforms, themselves, are using AI tools to continually promote and evolve their sites. Using AI, you can effectively help your marketing strategies grow and evolve, to continually adapt and work for you and your ever-changing needs. 

How exactly can AI step in to help improve social media strategies? 

I have pulled together the many ways AI can help improve your social media marketing in order to effectively reach your target audience, improve growth, compel engagement, and ultimately reach your social goals. 

AI has been transforming the way businesses use social media for marketing for products and services, and continues to drive innovation in the field. Using AI, brands can more effectively determine the best times to post, can choose the best images to suit their needs, and can even develop unique and engaging captions. This AI-generated content makes it far easier to maintain your online presence, and do so in a way that, when done right, is not robotic or half-hearted. 

AI can also help businesses create more effective social campaigns while maximizing efficiency and drawing on insights from consumer data. Using AI, companies can automate numerous processes, in order to better leverage their social media platforms and see an increase in marketing ROI. 

AI can also improve user experience by analyzing customer feedback and comments, identifying influencers who will most closely align with your goals, and even schedule posts to maintain consistency for your followers. 

In all of these tools and more, you can see an improvement in the performance of your social media posts, and even a bump up in the engagement seen in your target audience. While not all social media strategies rely heavily on AI, it has continually proven its value in improving the social presence of businesses. 

Leveraging AI in your social media marketing efforts can extend from writing captions to generating images, to planning out social media direction altogether. Whether you use AI in other aspects of your business, such as blog post creation or automation, there are specific and valuable ways in which AI can be used specifically for social media management, to gather valuable insights and drive the direction of your strategy. I have put together the most significant ways in which AI can be useful for social media strategy below. 

Content Creation and Management

AI can do just about everything regarding content creation and management: AI can create social media posts for you, can draft and subsequently target social ads, and can even automate monitoring. Bringing in a steady stream of relevant content is a significant part of maintaining your social media accounts, and even improving user experience, so bringing AI in to help create content can help free up valuable time and even funds. 

Social Media Management Automation

Social media management on its own is important, but automating managing tasks can take a substantial weight off of your marketing team, and can help make these tasks more efficient. AI can be used to extract insights from customer data, in order to produce sentiment analysis, better leverage your social media platforms, and ultimately achieve improved marketing ROI. 

Customer engagement and user experience can also be measured by AI, by combing through customer feedback and comments, and adjusting processes where necessary, or compiling reports on the most common sources of frustration from customers. 

AI can also help measure content performance across your social networks, identify any influencers who may be a good fit for your company, and schedule posts, to make sure that your social media channels are performing well, staying up to date on all of the latest trends and insights, and you are staying top of mind. 

Further Reading: The 17 Best Social Media Automation Tools to Use in 2024

Personalized Recommendations

Artificial intelligence is an incredible tool for content creators, because it can help develop personalized recommendations in real time based on the interests and behavior of your followers. Although social media analytics can go a long way toward helping content creators develop content for their social networks, AI takes it one step further by analyzing behavior and then delivering recommendations to those people. 

Ultimately, this means that AI can be used to create more targeted and effective social media campaigns. Social posts can be not a shot in the dark, but a well-informed part of your marketing strategy that helps you develop compelling pieces for all of your social platforms, to drive engagement rates, and improve your standing in the minds of your followers. 

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Image and Speech Recognition

In a similar vein, AI-powered image and speech recognition programs can help you analyze user-generated content and effectively identify trends to use in your social posts. Data driven insights are easy enough to come by with AI, whether the AI in question functions as one of your social listening tools, or serves primarily as a data gathering device. 

Through image and speech recognition, AI can also help you identify any influencers or brand advocates who may be a valuable source of partnership according to their social media activity. Social posts can then be geared toward gaining their interest and attention, or can be used to display user-generated content and illustrate the value of your influencer campaigns. 

With the advent of strong social listening tools, AI can help marketers create more engaging and more effective social posts, while functioning as a social media management platform for all of your social channels. 

Some social media management platforms will have their own AI integrations included in them, while others will require an overhaul. In either case, though, you need not throw out the entirety of your marketing efforts or any content ideas you already had sketched out; instead, you can integrate AI into your existing social media marketing strategy and effectively increase customer satisfaction and engagement, and improve your likelihood of answering the needs and wants of your target audience. 

Further Reading: What Is and How to Build an AI Marketing Strategy (with 10 Case Studies)

Identify Areas for Improvement

Before you venture out into the world of AI tools, engage in some reflection. Where will AI be most helpful for you? Is content creation the area you struggle with the most? Are your social channels constantly struggling to maintain a consistent schedule? AI can be useful for content repurposing, influencer marketing, ad targeting, optimization, and more, so take a close look at your marketing tools and identify any gaps. 

From there, you can better determine which AI-powered tools can help you achieve your social media marketing goals. AI is intended to be a jumping-off point for many tasks, however, so always make sure that the content quality of an AI-developed piece of content is up to par. 

Finally, evaluate the effectiveness of your current social media marketing strategy, and look for any areas in need of improvement. Some automation tools and generative tools are great for automation, developing content ideas, and more, but you may not need the functionality that most of these tools provide. 

Choose the Right AI Tools

Choosing the right AI tools requires some careful consideration before making the leap. The same way that marketing decisions require careful research and consideration, selecting the right AI tools requires that you recognize which tools will and will not align with your social media marketing goals. 

Consider the features, pricing, and user reviews of each potential artificial intelligence tool before adopting one. These decisions will help save precious time or waste it, and will determine the likelihood of seeing increased ROI, so be sure to clearly lay out all of your needs, and read the product descriptions of all tools to make sure the tool in question actually meets your needs. 

As you determine which tool is right for you, also pay close attention to integration opportunities. If a tool can post at optimal times but the artificial intelligence technology in question does not have the ability to integrate with your management platform, the tool is unlikely to be an effective one to meet your needs. 

Train Your Team

AI can tackle truly complex tasks, but a taskmaster is still a necessary part of the equation. As such, it is important to train your team to use your AI-powered tools effectively. Ongoing training and support can be provided to make sure that your team is using any tools to their full potential, and limit the likelihood of experiencing human oversight in your social media planning. 

Once your team has the basics covered, encourage experimenting! Different social media tools using AI approach content topics and even the creation of social content differently, so encourage exploration as your team learns how to use the tools you have employed, and how to develop high-quality content as a result. 

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Further Reading: AI Social Media Tools: The Definitive 13 Apps You Should Know

Automate Repetitive Tasks

AI-powered tools can be used to automate a litany of repetitive tasks, in order to maximize the efficiency of your social media content strategy. Repetitive tasks like scheduling and optimizing content can be turned over to AI, while more intensive tasks are tackled by the marketing team. These types of tedious tasks can take a lot of time and effort to complete, so using AI may free up time and resources in order to focus on more value-driven tasks. 

Ai tools can also be used to find those cost-saving opportunities, even when you may not see them. Optimal ad spend is a simple way to use AI to empower your social media content strategy, as you can use the insights you have gleaned to increase reach and engagement, and maximize your return on investment. 

Measure Success and Adapt Strategy Accordingly

AI-powered analytics tools can be used to measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns–from visual content, to the captions and content you create–in order to help better inform future campaigns. AI can analyze data on audience engagement rates, ROI, and even the success rate of your ad campaigns. These AI-powered features are great for increasing efficiency, and making informed decisions about optimizing your social media presence to drive results. 

Importance of Balancing AI with Human Intelligence and the Human Touch

AI can handle numerous tasks efficiently. AI can be used to develop visual content, blog content, and even some video content. Artificial intelligence can help improve user engagement and increase customer satisfaction. It can automate tedious tasks and deliver a wide range of truly invaluable features to its users, to help boost social strategy and improve performance. 

That being said, a human touch is still essential for certain aspects of social media marketing, and a well-rounded and effective social strategy is not one that relies entirely on AI. Instead, a combination of AI tools and the human touch is typically considered the best way forward. 

Think of it this way: although a chatbot can take in questions and spit back out an answer, most of these services cannot fully comprehend and then handle complex customer service inquiries, or sensitive issues that require a level of empathy and understanding that an AI product cannot produce. 

AI is a wonderful tool to help improve your social profiles, maintain your content calendar, and even glean content inspiration. It is not, however, intended to usurp the decision-making process as a whole, as human judgment continues to be a much closer manager for content creation. An AI tool, for instance, cannot make sure that their operations consistently align with company goals and ethical standards. AI content management tools cannot always ensure that the content pieces in question are appropriate, but a human eye can. 

Finding a balance between AI-generated posts and AI processes and human insight is essential to design a more effective and responsible social media marketing strategy.  Customer interactions can be enhanced by AI, or encouraged by developing popular posts using AI, and post inspiration can be found through AI, but making the post ready for publication should fall to a member of the marketing team whenever possible.

Further Reading: 15 Best Tools to Humanize AI Text

Conclusion

Using AI to save time and energy–think using it to bulk schedule posts, develop ideas for posts, and using AI-powered chatbots to address basic questions and inquiries–is one of the best ways to incorporate AI into your social channels and experience significant results. AI can successfully help you come up with content ideas for your social channels, keep a close eye on social listening tools, and develop a competitive analysis to guide your social media strategy. Used properly, AI tools can transform your platforms, improve customer experience, and increase marketing ROI. 

With proper pairing between AI social media tools and a human touch, AI can be used to develop high-quality social content, streamline your marketing processes, and prepare for future campaigns. 

How do you use AI in your marketing efforts? Let me know in the comments below! 

Further Reading: 25 Ways How to Leverage AI in Digital Marketing Today