Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming everything. You don’t have to look far to see how AI is already impacting your day-to-day life.
Think about the smart assistant on your phone, it isn’t powered by magic. Instead, AI lets it answer your questions. Think about when you’re searching on Google; are you getting ads for products you recently looked at? Yep, you guessed it, this is also because of AI. And the AI revolution won’t stop there. The technologies of tomorrow, like driverless cars, will function because of AI.
Businesses are all jumping onto the AI bandwagon. And why not? Advancements in AI, such as machine learning, allows organizations to be more effective than ever. This brings new and exciting ways of connecting with audiences, speeding up internal processes, and much more. We also see AI in user testing apps and for planning the future products.
A core example of how AI is boosting businesses is through social media. Wondering how you can use AI to boost your business? Read on to find out.
- What Exactly Is AI?
- How Does AI Work In Social Media?
- How Can A Business Use AI On Social Media?
- What About Using AI In Other Forms of Marketing?
- Embrace AI & Transform Your Business
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
What Exactly Is AI?
Image Source: Exploding Topics
Just because AI is everywhere, doesn’t mean that everyone understands it. Let’s be honest, when a lot of people think of AI, they imagine robots coming to take over the planet. The truth isn’t quite so fanciful, AI (currently) has no plans to take over the world. Instead, we’re using it to make our everyday lives easier.
We’ve already touched upon AI’s impact in the current world. The tech covers everything from contract management software to smart lighting. But how exactly does it achieve these feats? Obviously, AI is extremely complex, but the core concept is actually quite simple.
An AI algorithm attempts to recreate human thought patterns to complete tasks. To do this, it needs a constant feed of high-quality data. Ever wondered why so many businesses are so desperate to collect data? In part, it’s because organizations want to build effective AI systems.
How Does AI Work In Social Media?
The fact is, social media wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for AI. Many different aspects of social networks rely on technology. For example, if you use Twitter, you’ll notice that you receive recommended tweets and profiles that you might want to follow. Similar to how product recommendations work on Amazon, AI analyzes your behavior on the platform to find content that you might like. This helps them to make users spend more and more time on the platform, thus increasing their user engagement rate and experience.
Many social media platforms also use AI as a way of spotting abuse in comment sections and messages. Facebook, for example, uses an AI tool known as deep text to spot instances of abuse. According to Facebook, the end goal of this technology is to build a system with the same level of intelligence as a human.
Know more about How To Effectively Manage Facebook Ad Comments
But it isn’t just the social media platforms themselves that are using AI. Social media users, too, are taking advantage of this technology. There are now AI influencers. Yes, you read that correctly, a nonhuman AI-powered influencer. If that doesn’t terrify you, nothing will.
Image Source: Instagram
A good example would be Lil Miquela, an AI influencer described as a ‘19-year-old Robot living in LA’. The account is actually a clever marketing stunt by Brud, an LA based startup. It’s fair to say that the stunt paid off as Lilmiquela now has over 3 million followers.
But what does this mean for you as a business? Do you need to create your own AI powered robot? Well, not quite. While innovations like this seem to be where the technology is going, the primary use of AI is still to make your life easier.
How Can A Business Use AI On Social Media?
There’s no denying the importance of social media for businesses. More than half the world (58.4%) is now on social media. This makes it the biggest focus group on the planet with a potentially endless well of customers. If your business isn’t on social media yet, it's the right time to start now.
But keeping up with the demand for content isn’t always easy. You need to think of new topics that will make interesting posts. You also need to make sure that you’re posting at optimal times to get the best response. It’s all a bit headache-inducing, but this is where AI shines. AI technology can help all employees to improve their social media performance, regardless of whether they are in the office or carrying out remote work. Using tools that are integrated with AI technology, like Planable AI is a great example of how this approach can help improve your efforts and save time.
Let’s look at some ways how AI can make your life easier.
Get Personalizing
Image Source: Unfold Labs Medium
Generic content just isn’t up to scratch in the digital world. People want content that is made for them. This is especially the case when finding new products to buy. Many customers expect offers to be tailored to them, based on their interactions with a brand. If you want to earn digital applause, you need to personalize.
Obviously, personalization isn’t going to be a walk in the park. You can hardly personalize for each individual customer on social media. Instead, your posts need to engage lots of people at once. But that doesn’t mean your posts can’t be relevant to your followers.
You’ll probably start by carrying out some market research into your audience. Now, this isn’t wrong, there is always a place for market research, but today we can go much further. After all, we have a treasure trove of data on social media, with access to each follower’s behaviors and interests.
This is where AI can help you. A system called ‘content popularity prediction’ uses AI to analyze and understand customers. It can then recommend the kind of content that they might want to see. No more hours spent head-scratching, trying to find the best content. You can learn what you need quickly and easily with the power of AI.
Of course, this information has the potential to help with more than just social media. You can start to improve your overall content marketing. This means more effective emailing, and more interactive and engaging content on your website.
Learn The Customer’s Value
The idea of people having a value might sound a bit dystopian, but it’s a concept you’ll need to focus on if you want to succeed in business. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the amount of monetary value they will bring throughout their relationship with your business. It’s a critical piece of information for your marketing.
After all, there’s no point in spending money and resources chasing customers with low predicted value. But LTV also isn’t static and can be increased over time. To do so, you’ll need to be present throughout every stage of a customer’s journey, improving experiences. The more positively a customer views you, the longer they’ll spend their hard-earned cash with you.
AI in social media can help you with both aspects of LTV. As you build up to bigger followings, you’ll amass potential customers. AI can analyze the habits of these followers to predict their LTV more accurately. The technology also comes in handy when you want to extend a customer’s LTV, providing insights into how you can improve their experience.
To improve experiences, you’ll need to make sure your website is top class. Otherwise, people won’t stick around after clicking a post. You’ll need to make sure that you choose the right web hosting services to keep your website up to scratch.
In a nutshell, AI helps you to save time and resources by making sure you get the most out of your customers.
Create Your Posts
Image Source: SocialBu
If you want to succeed on social media, you need to post! This might sound basic, but it’s the first basic hurdle that many businesses fail to navigate. This doesn’t mean posting once or twice a week. You need to be posting at least once per day if you’re to receive the most engagement. But this is easier said than done and, as we’ve already said, many businesses simply don’t.
Don’t be fooled, however, social media marketing is essential. In fact, 88% of marketers say that social media marketing helped bring more exposure, and 60% said that it helped increase sales. But if it’s so important, why do so many businesses miss the mark? Well, there are numerous reasons why organizations struggle with social media. These include:
- Missing the optimal time to post (this is different on each platform)
- Failing to come up with an interesting post
- Lack of expertise on social media
- Failing to grow follower bases
Are some of these issues familiar to you? You probably wish you could have a robot handling all posting for you. Well, good news, you can! As we’ve already touched upon, AI uses machine learning technology. This means that it is able to learn and adapt to changes without any specific instruction.
AI can use this technology to scan different trending posts on social media. It can then recommend topics for you to include in your posts, or even write them for you! AI can even schedule your posts, so you don’t have to spend time manually setting them up.
If you do decide to let AI take over the actual writing of your posts, you might want to have a trial run first. It’s a good idea to carry out crowdtesting to make sure that everything is working as it should be.
This means less time head-scratching and more time posting!
Build Better Ads
Lots of businesses use social media to advertise. The sheer number of users makes it a prime candidate for conversion and producing sales. Most businesses focus on a specific form of online advertising called pay-per-click (PPC). With PPC, each time a potential customer clicks on your ad, you have to pay a set fee.
Obviously, the end goal of advertising is to make more than you spend. But PPC is only effective if, after clicking a link, a customer makes a purchase. If you’re finding that customers aren’t making purchases from your PPC advertising, it’s a good indication that you need to make your content more engaging.
As with general posting on social media, AI, powered by machine learning, can come in handy. It can write and schedule posts and find ways to optimize your PPC.
Improve Response Times
Customer support is a potential lifeline for your business. Let’s be honest, there will be times when you don’t get everything right. This is natural in business. But customers might not be quite so understanding. This is when your customer support is critical, by offering you a chance to make amends. Better customer support translates into customer and employee retention.
We’ve all been there, stuck on a support line waiting for our calls to be answered. It’s a long and tedious process. For this reason, a lot of customers now prefer to use social media chats instead of phone calls. This is also potentially beneficial to you – less serious issues can be sorted online, freeing phone lines to deal with more difficult cases.
Problems occur when your online chats are no quicker to respond than your call agents. There are reasons why there could be a delay - you might, for example, be dealing with an influx of customers. But once again, people contacting you won’t necessarily see this side. What’s the solution? Instead of having staff answer all queries, why not get the help of an AI chatbot.?
If you choose the right option, a chatbot can give your customer support a real boost. What’s more, machine learning means that AI can learn from interactions with customers and improve responses. If AI is unable to help a customer, it can refer them to a human to help resolve their query.
The result of this should be a drop in queuing; chatbots resolve simple queries. When this isn’t possible, customers can reach humans much more quickly.
Moderate Your Content
It’s fair to say that social media isn’t always the most pleasant place to be. Sometimes you’ll get trolls sending abusive and hateful comments. This does not help the community that you’re trying to build and can damage the wellbeing of your staff. In worse situations, you could run into malicious accounts posting spam or trying to scam your audience.
It’s important that you keep an eye out for these kinds of comments. The quicker that they can be removed, the better for your online community. But when you’re dealing with lots of comments, these users can be harder to spot. This is when it's useful to have an automated system designed to spot any wrongdoing.
AI can analyze comments for abuse or spam. It can then block users and remove any comments classed as abusive. This means less time spent sifting through comments and more time for creating better content for your audience.
Better Analytics
As you spend time online, you’ll collect more and more data. And we now know how important this can be for advancing your business. Data can be ram-packed with insights to help you improve your organization. But whilst you might have data, how well do you understand it? To understand your data, you’ll need the right analytics tools to help you unpack information.
The best analytics programs use AI to give detailed reports about your data. So, no more teeth pulling trying to understand your audience and the content that they like. Instead, information is presented in an accessible and actionable way. It can, therefore, help you make decisions such as which of the many different platforms to focus on and which types of content your audience most want to see.
What About Using AI In Other Forms of Marketing?
Of course, AI isn’t just for social media. You’ll need to use lots of different forms of marketing in tandem with social media. AI can help with each in many, many ways. Here are a few highlights:
- Give insights into your email referral program
- Find keywords for paid search marketing
- Automate the production of printed materials for on-the-ground marketing
Embrace AI & Transform Your Business
From AI-powered social media influencers, to driverless cars, AI is the future. And the future is where your business should be. This means always being one step ahead and embracing the technologies of tomorrow.
As we’ve explored, there are already countless ways that AI can help you, and social media is just one slice of a very large cake. It is, however, a very important slice.
If you want to be ahead of the curve, you’ll need AI. So, start by looking at social media. Your strategy there will inform how you grow your business. Once you’ve devised a winning social media strategy, you can start looking at other ways that AI might help you.
Of course, introducing new systems and software into your organization isn’t always trouble-free. Make sure you take the time to carry out different types of testing before going live.
The future might be daunting, but it is clear. Embrace AI and you can transform your business.
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