Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making its foray into all kinds of fields. Social media marketing is also witnessing a change powered by the technologies that utilize AI at the core.
Social media platforms are evolving at a fast pace to keep up with the shifting nature of users and how they consume content. This in turn creates a challenge for brands to make the most of what social media platforms have to offer. AI offers brands a mechanism to gather and analyze user data in real-time and use to it improve social media campaign strategies.
If you are still sceptical about the growth of the AI market in the social media industry, then you will be interested to know that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for AI in social media is reported to be 28.3% between 2018 to 2023. This is a $2.2 billion market by 2023.
As a marketer, you can use machine learning and AI to get useful insights into buyers’ preferences, automate tasks and make insightful decisions to achieve a higher rate of ROI. With this article, our aim is to teach you how to give a boost to your social media marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing is Right For You?
Social media marketing remains one of the best ways to reach, engage and convert potential buyers as it helps you to micro-target the audience segments. Furthermore, more than half of the world is on social media. As per Statista, there are over 3.6 billion active social media users as of 2020 and this number is expected to rise to 4.41 billion by 2025.
As people were under lockdown due to COVID-19, they were forced to spend more time indoors and this gave a push to the adoption of social media. Not only growth, but 87% of people are spending more time on social media. This behaviour is affecting how people make buying decisions and research for a brand.
For your business, it means building a strong brand presence on social media, if you already don’t have one. Your competitors can outgrow you by utilizing the power of social media. Why give them the opportunity when you can benefit from using AI in social media marketing as we discuss here.
Benefits of Using Artificial Intelligence in Social Media Marketing
Artificial intelligence is not an exact technology but an umbrella term. It covers technologies such as machine learning, image recognition, natural language processing and deep learning.
From understanding and learning from customers to automating interactions, you can put many of your business processes on autopilot by implementing artificial intelligence. This is the reason why AI has got the attention of so many brands which are using AI-powered solutions to improve their marketing efforts at a lesser budget and time to generate better results.
There are several benefits to using AI in social media marketing campaigns, the biggest of which are:
- Unmatched insights into user behavior
- Streamlined marketing processes
- Greater efficiency and productivity
- Increased user engagement
- Improved user experience
- Higher ROI
- Reduced marketing costs
Now that you are aware of the benefits, let’s see how you can leverage AI in social media marketing.
Improved Customer Intelligence
Marketing success depends on understanding your consumers and then framing a strategy. Effective marketing is when you are able to provide a solution to your consumers after understanding what they want and need.
With AI and machine learning combined, you can better make sense of social and behavioral data to more accurately understand your customers. It can be a tedious and time-consuming task to extract behavioral patterns and analyze numbers, AI can do it quickly and more accurately. Furthermore, AI gets better with every interaction with your customers which helps it to make intuitive decisions about their needs, preferences and purchase behaviors.
Social Media Content Creation and Distribution with AI
AI is self-reliant enough to create shareable content for social media and also help in its management better. For instance, Lately uses AI to create shorter format social media posts from the context of a larger piece of content.
There are many AI-powered tools available you can use to minimize your social media marketing planning as they can help you to find out:
What’s trending
What kind of content works of social media
Best time to post the content
How often to post
And more.
Ensuring your content reaches the right people is the only thing more important than content creation. AI-powered tools can help you exactly with that by offering intelligent content distribution.
Improve Visual Content Strategy with AI
Visual content is a leader to drive traffic and sales from social media platforms. Big brands are already betting big on AI tools for improving their visual content strategy.
Dash Hudson is one such tool that brands like Unilever, REVOLVE and P&G to analyze and predict how their videos and photos will perform on social media, without actually posting them. By evaluating the color, texture, composition, and subject of the images, this tool predicts how the audience will react to them.
Such AI tools can help you identify what sort of visuals will resonate most with your prospective customers and leave a lasting impression.
Sell More by Combining AI with Augmented Reality (AR)
Both artificial intelligence and augmented reality can help you increase your sales. The augmented reality created a stir when it was first introduced. Now brands are looking into the application of this technology to offer virtual try-on experiences to customers via social media. Customers are more likely to buy products knowing that they can try them before investing.
Did we tell you, that customers can do all this without even leaving the social media app?
Yes, Facebook and Instagram are already making efforts to make shopping on social media more appealing. Ray-Ban is already profiteering from this approach as they are offering their customers a chance to know a sunglass will look on their face before buying one. We are sure your business can also capitalize on this trend.
AI Chatbots for Customer Engagement Improvement
While the idea of interacting with a robot was alienating in the past, but now people prefer to chat with bots. According to a study, 56% of people now prefer to interact with chatbots to get an answer to their queries, report problems and get resolutions.
This change was brought about by the capability of AI to empower chatbots to offer smarter, effective and instant solutions to customer requests.
AI chatbots have enabled brands to cut down the customer support wait time. Also, as Chatbots can retain customer data, customers do not have to repeat after themselves. This helps improve customer support experience and also:
- Reduces customer service cost
- Makes 24/7 support possible
- Provides an instant solution to problems
- Display personalized product recommendations
- Assist customers in product searches
Chatbots are not limited to just websites, they can now be integrated into social media and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology that can help both business owners and marketers save time and money.
Whether you provide online services, run an online store or offer offline products, you can benefit from incorporating AI into your social media marketing strategy.
