Marketing How to Make AI Work for Your Social Media Marketing Elizabeth Holloway Marketing 8 mins read Nov 4, 2024 Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s impossible to miss the explosion of AI tools across the internet. From large language models (LLMs) to automation tools, AI is revolutionizing how we approach content creation and marketing automation. With any new technology, there’s always a trial and error period as we build an understanding of what it can do well—and what it can’t. There’s a lot of pressure to integrate AI into your social media marketing strategy, but if you aren’t familiar with the best use cases for the technology it can backfire on you. If you don’t have a strategy for implementing AI, what is meant to save you time can end up costing you money because of poor performance. Today, we’re going over the five best ways to integrate AI into your social media strategy, as well as common mistakes you’ll want to avoid. AI—a new frontier in social media marketing AI has been a game changer for social media marketers. These tools are rapidly expanding what you are able to achieve working within your budget. AI-driven tools let you streamline your marketing efforts, tackling those menial, repetitive tasks and freeing up your time to focus on your digital strategy. More than 80% of industry experts integrate some form of AI technology into their online marketing activities (Statista, 2023). More than just automating repetitive tasks, AI can offer deeper insights through data collection, and create personalized content at scale. What used to take a large team and even larger budget can be accomplished with the right AI tools. 5 ways to use AI for your social media marketing As you start charting out the road map for integrating AI into your social media marketing, the first step is to identify the areas you’re going to be supplementing with AI. We’ve put together five of the most effective ways to use AI in your marketing efforts. Knowing the best uses of AI will help you decide on the right tools. 1. Content creation and curation AI tools for content creation have come a long way. Large language models and image generators can help you cut down on production costs and improve turnaround time. Whether you’re using ChatGPT or another LLM, these tools can take you through content ideations and drafting to crafting optimized captions and hashtags. It should be noted that you will still want to read and verify the content you generate with AI. These LLMs are getting better every day, but they are still prone to errors and hallucinations. It’s a good idea to build in a process for review in your workflows. 2. Scheduling and posting automation Always be posting. The success of any social media marketing relies on a healthy posting roster. Beyond just having lots of fresh content to post, you want to time your posts for when your target audience is most active. Depending on what time of day that is, you might need posts to go out in the middle of the night, or on the weekend. It’s not exactly practical to have your social media team on call 24/7. This is where scheduling and posting automation comes in. Tools like HubSpot’s Breeze Social Agent combine your past performance data, target audience and value propositions, as well as industry best practices to give you actionable insights about when and what to post to maximize engagement. 3. Audience segmentation and targeting AI is so effective at identifying and targeting niche audiences because it employs predictive analytics. This is a branch of advanced analytics that uses historical data in combination with statistical modeling, data mining and machine learning to make predictions about future outcomes—in this case about consumer behaviour. Through predictive analytics, AI can forecast which products, features or content will best resonate with your target audience. The fact is that AI can process data at speeds and volumes that would take humans a lifetime to parse. This vast capacity for data crunching means that AI will identify trends and provide insights that you’d likely miss entirely. 4. Social listening and sentiment analysis Have you ever wondered if there’s a better way to track conversations and brand mentions on social media? AI can help with that. Staying on top of who’s talking about you and what they’re saying helps inform your future marketing efforts. It’s more than just monitoring whether people are saying good or bad things about your brand. Social listening gives you insight into the kinds of questions people might have about your products, as well as emerging trends. Being able to position yourself to answer those questions and engage in trending topics will boost brand loyalty by demonstrating that you are responsive to your consumer base. Harnessing the data processing power of AI to track and analyze social media activity is a no-brainer. That’s why more and more CRMs are adding social listening tools to their service offerings. 5. Performance tracking and analytics When it comes to tracking and analyzing performance of your posts or campaigns, AI is a huge time saver. AI-powered analytics let you set up custom parameters to automatically track KPIs like engagement rate, reach, conversions and more. You’ll also get auto-generated reports that break down your performance metrics, as well as let you compare current performance with past timeframes. Consider adding tools like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI or Google LookerStudio that will track performance and provide you with helpful data visualization that allows you to make data-driven decisions about your business and marketing efforts. Mistakes to avoid when integrating AI into your social media strategy In the rush to adopt AI tools, there are a few missteps that are all too easy to make. These mistakes largely come down to over-valuing machine learning over the human touch. AI tools are fantastic for a lot of things, but they aren’t a perfect replacement for humans. This is because AI is prone to missing the kind of nuances that are glaringly obvious to people—not to mention that their output is noticeably uniform and repetitive. Over-reliance on automation There are trade-offs with every technology. In this case, while relying on automation saves you a lot of time and work, people do start to notice. Especially when it comes to public facing marketing, consumers value authenticity and a human touch. They want to feel that there are people behind your brand. While it can be tempted to rely exclusively on AI-generated content, you end up losing your brand voice. AI is prone to overusing certain vocabulary that has become a dead giveaway for AI generated copy. The result is content that is off message and failing to connect with your target audience. Over-reliance on automation can also lead to missed opportunities for real-time engagement with your audience. Automated posting won’t alert you to a conversation popping off in your comment sections. Ensuring that you have people monitoring your social feeds and being able to create relevant content on short notice is important for building lasting relationships with your consumers. Misinterpreting AI data It’s important to keep in mind that AI doesn’t think the way humans do. It’s possible, and all too common, to misinterpret the data AI is giving you. This can have dire implications for future marketing decisions if you don’t take the time to verify the data and make sure it lines up with human insights. These tools will often provide recommended actions, but they might not have access to the necessary context. When it comes to the data produced by AI tools, always remember to trust but verify. Not having a clear strategy There is absolutely too much of a good thing when it comes to using AI tools. People often make the mistake of assuming that AI will produce better work across the board than humans. The reality is that there are some clear limitations to what AI does well, and knowing that in advance will save you a lot of trouble. Before you start using AI, take the time to assess your needs and expectations, and formulate a strategy for how you will approach integrating AI into your workflows. Make sure you have a solid roadmap before deploying these tools, and that you have resources available to review the AI output. What’s the takeaway? AI is completely changing how we approach social media marketing. From offering better tracking and analytics, creating personalized content at scale or simple posting automation, AI-driven tools are an invaluable asset in your marketing strategy. But there are ways to misuse AI. Before you decide on which tools to add to your tech stack, make sure that those tools align with your needs. There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to AI. And most importantly—make sure your social media presence never loses its human touch! Share This Article Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email
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