What Is Artificial Intelligence for Social Media?

Artificial intelligence and social media are a match made in heaven. That's because AI can help marketers increase productivity and performance in their work and across popular social media platforms.

Today, social media AI tools can uncover deep insights about your audience, predict which types of content will resonate most, create posts and images automatically, detect consumer trends and understand sentiment, and much, much more.

In fact, every social media platform on the planet uses AI in some way to function. AI dictates what content surfaces in your feed. It moderates comments and content to improve user experience. And it suggests content and accounts you might like.

Make no mistake, AI vastly improves your social media experience. But it also makes social media marketing difficult. You basically have to guess which content will make both human audiences and AI algorithms happy. 

Social media professionals are often great at the human side of the equation. We have our pulse on what captures consumer attention and drives engagement. We know how to build authentic relationships with our audiences. And we excel at building social communities of like-minded people and customers. But when it comes to what “The Algorithm" wants, we're left guessing. And, all too often, we resort to cheap tricks and passing fads to boost our engagement—without creating any real, lasting value for our audiences.

Paradoxically, AI can actually help us do more authentic, more human social media marketing.

It can help us actually make sense of the firehose of data provided by social media platforms, so we can then create social media content that is actually valuable to audiences. AI can make sense of what people write, post, and comment on, so we can give them more of what they actually want. And it can understand why they engage, so we can better cater to their needs.

(Not to mention, AI can save tons of time and money by helping us do all of this at scale.)

That's why today's leading social media marketers are using AI to:

• Automate tedious tasks to reduce costs and time spent on low-level social media management work.
• Scale up social media strategies across platforms.
• And produce data-driven posts and campaigns that actually get results.

No matter your size or budget, you can do the same thing.

The rest of this post shows you how.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Demis Hassabis CEO of AI company DeepMind, calls artificial intelligence the "science of making machines smart."

You don't need to know everything about AI to use it in your social media marketing—you just need to know these basics.

Demis Hassabis CEO of AI company DeepMind, calls artificial intelligence the “science of making machines smart.”

That means we teach machines to mimic human intelligence. We give them the ability to see, hear, speak, move, and write.

You see these abilities on display in the smart hardware and software you use every day…

Your smartphone uses artificial intelligence to power voice assistants and real-time navigation. Your favorite companies, like Amazon and Netflix, use AI to recommend products and content. And email clients like Gmail even use AI to automatically write parts of emails for you.

AI's most impressive capabilities are powered by machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of AI that allows machines to make accurate predictions based on large sets of data. The smartest AI tools then actually improve the accuracy of their predictions over time. This ability to get smarter, often without direct human involvement, is why AI is so powerful…

Give AI enough data, and it can unlock potentially unlimited performance potential.

Today, artificial intelligence technology uses data to make increasingly relevant and accurate predictions about everything from what product you want to buy next to which ad campaign to run to which content topics to cover on your blog.

AI can read and write using natural language generation and natural language processing. It can detect and mimic tone of voice using sentiment analysis. It can detect images, video, and faces using image recognition and computer vision capabilities. AI can even predict performance and recommend actions.

In turn, these capabilities can be used to give your social media marketing superpowers.

The Benefits of AI in Social Media

Posting and engaging on social media is a key piece of most companies' digital marketing strategy—and AI can help you do it better than before.

In social media, AI can both accelerate revenue and reduce costs across a range of use cases.

Accelerate Revenue

Because artificial intelligence learns from data, it can use data from social media audiences to accelerate revenue in a number of ways, such as:

• Learn which headlines, words, and images in posts lead to the most engagement
• Discover new audiences and trends based on sentiment analysis
• Predict who will take action and buy more, then target them with social messages

Reduce Costs

AI can also be used to reduce costs across social media marketing activities, by making your work more efficient and automated. In fact, AI can:

• Automate and scale the creation of content for social media ud
• Automatically resize and reformat creative for different channels
• social media audiences with ads and regulate spend

Top Use Cases for AI in Social Media

AI technology is a key component of the popular social networks you use every single day—and of marketing on those platforms.

Facebook uses advanced machine learning to do everything from serve you content to recognize your face in photos to target users with advertising. Instagram (owned by Facebook) uses AI to identify visuals.

LinkedIn uses AI to offer job recommendations, suggest people you might like to connect with, and serving you specific posts in your feed.

Snapchat leverages the power of computer vision, an AI technology, to track your features and overlay filters that move with your face in real-time.

These are just a few examples of how AI works behind the scenes to power features of the world's most popular social networks.

And, across all social media platforms and each social media post, an AI algorithm or machine learning system is regulating how the content you create and the ads you buy are placed in front of users-often in ways that aren't entirely transparent to marketers.

This is all to say that AI is a fundamental part of how today's social networks function.

But, AI often operates behind the scenes of popular platforms, and entirely at the discretion of the company that owns the platform.

However, that doesn't mean marketers can't leverage AI for their social media strategy.

In fact, there are many commercially available artificial intelligence social media monitoring and marketing tools across a number of use cases.

Here are a handful of the top ways social media marketers can start using AI in their work.

Analyze and Decode Post Performance

Posting on social media is relatively easy. Knowing what’s actually working, and duplicating it time and time again, isn’t.

Too often, we follow our gut and use guesswork to determine what topics on social will resonate with our audiences. AI presents a better way of doing things.

Using AI, we can actually begin to decode what is working on different platforms based on all the performance data we have at our fingertips. AI can then surface for us insights and improvements that help us identify what’s actually working and double-down on it, as well as cut loose low-performing ideas and posts. It’s simply a smarter way of doing social media strategy—one that’s available to every marketer today thanks to off-the-shelf AI technology.

Write Social Media Posts

If you’re not using generative AI to help you create new social media copy, you’re missing out.

Today, generative AI tools are great at writing short, compelling social shares for different platforms that sound authentic. In fact, many social media marketers are saving tons of time by having AI write first drafts of posts for them, then polishing them up with a unique human touch. They’re also using AI to overcome writer's block by generating high-quality posts to spin off in different directions or variations.

Create Posts Automatically from Existing Content

Generative AI for social media isn’t just about new content creation, either. Smart social marketers are using AI tools to take existing content, landing pages, and assets, then quickly turn them into social posts for different platforms in seconds. It’s a smarter way to scale up any type of social media promotion quickly and effectively, and one that every social media marketer should check out.

Create Video Snippets Automatically from Longer Content

Video is a critical piece of any social media strategy, given the popularity of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But creating a high-volume of quality clips to promote your content and brand can be an enormous investment of time and money.

Monitor Brand Mentions and Sentiment

AI excels at understanding conversations—even those that happen on social media at scale. That means you can use AI to automatically keep tabs in real-time on brand mentions when you’re being talked about across social channels. You can also use AI-powered social listening to gauge the sentiment of the conversations happening around your brand, your products, or your market, in order to take action to preserve your brand reputation online—or improve it.

Optimize Posting Time to Ensure Max Engagement

AI can use vast amounts of data to understand when makes the most sense to post on social media, based on the times your audience engages with content. So, instead of blasting out messages when your social media team happens to be awake—or making a best guess as to when to schedule posts—you can actually increase the chance your content gets seen by the right people at the right time.

Predict the Viral Potential of Content

Using historical performance data and data from social media networks, AI tools today can begin to estimate how likely it is that certain pieces of content you post will gain popularity—and even go viral. So, instead of simply going with your gut about what might engage audiences, AI can actually tell you what’s might be most engaging—backed by data.

You can use this information to run campaigns with more predictable performance, and take steps to improve campaigns with low forecasted engagement.

Optimize and Manage Social Media Ads

Almost any social media platform gives marketers an unprecedented ability to run paid ads to platform users based on highly granular demographic and behavioral targeting.

But marketers still need to write or create ad creative...or do they?

Artificial intelligence tools exist today that will actually write Facebook and Instagram ads for you. The ads are optimized for clicks and conversions, thanks to AI's ability to predict at scale which language will improve results.

Find the Right Influencer and Generate AI Influencers

Finding the right influencer can put a brand on the map. But how do you do so efficiently? AI can lend a hand.

AI-powered influencer research platforms analyze a variety of social media analytics to understand which accounts can provide the most engagement, reach, and influence for a specific industry. Using the technology, brand can even create an AI influencer, a completely artificial avatar like Lil Miquela, to represent your brand 24/7 on social media.