AI in Social Media Today: The Best Use Cases and Benefits

If you’re a digital marketer, you know how challenging it is to manage your business’s social media. You have to manage multiple channels, generate new posts with eye-catching graphics, not to mention all your other daily tasks. 

Additionally, there are always new trends, features, and technological updates to keep up with. Right now, artificial intelligence (AI) is making the loudest noise in technology updates. 

Well, why not use AI in your social media strategy? Using AI in your social media strategy can save you and your team hours each week — yes, you read that right. Keep reading to learn what AI in social media looks like, how to best use AI in your social media strategy, and the top benefits of AI in social media.

What is AI in Social Media?

Before explaining how AI fits into social media, we must define AI. AI is a machine’s ability to perceive, synthesize, and deduce information and perform cognitive tasks generally associated with human intellect.

AI in social media simply means using AI tools that can act as a comarketer or assistant to humans to help automate, manage, and optimize social media tasks and overall strategy.

The use of AI in social media is growing at a rapid pace. According to one report, AI in social media’s global market generated $992.7 million in 2021 and is expected to reach $12 billion by 2031.

Many social media platforms already use AI and plan to incorporate more AI software soon. For instance, Meta recently announced its plan to include generative AI features in Instagram.

With all these rapid advancements in AI technology, it’s important to remember that using AI in social media isn’t a replacement for humans. Instead, your social media marketing team can use these AI tools to help them do their job more efficiently and effectively. 

Now that you understand what AI in social media is, let’s dive into how to increase your social media marketing efficiency with AI.

Five Ways to Use AI in Social Media

AI has many applications in digital marketing, including social media marketing. Below are a few of the best ways to use AI in social media.

1. Generate Social Media Content

Constantly coming up with new ideas or generating witty and engaging social content is challenging. Stop banging your head against a wall to come up with novel ideas.

Instead, you can use generative AI, like ChatGPT, to develop new and intriguing content ideas. These generated ideas might not be perfect, but they’ll help get your creative juices flowing. 

You can also use generative AI to design images, create captions, produce video scripts, and create other high-converting content. Here’s an example of using Chat-GPT to create a few social media captions.

Remember that AI is your comarketing partner. A human touch is still needed. You should proofread and carefully edit any AI-generated content to ensure accuracy and limit grammatical errors.

2. Provide Content Recommendations

One of the most valuable capabilities of AI is its ability to analyze large data sets and make recommendations. For instance, AI can analyze social media content, including text, images, and video elements, to identify themes or patterns. It can also gather data and recognize patterns in user behavior and content consumption.

Combining these two data sets, AI can suggest similar social media campaigns or common themes to include in social posts that align with your most popular content. 

This removes lots of data analysis and guesswork for your social media marketers. It also gives you the ability to generate more goal-oriented content.

3. Upgrade Your Online Reputation Management

With social media’s rise in popularity and usage, many consumers turn to your corporate or local social media pages for customer support or to post about your brand. Responding to these engagements often improves consumer perception of your brand and reduces churn rate.

More than three-quarters of people expect companies to respond to comments on social media, and 83 percent of those people expect a response within 24 hours. 

That said, tracking and responding to these social media comments can become time-consuming. AI can help you monitor and track these engagements. You can also use generative AI to respond to these social media engagements more promptly. Using AI to track and respond to social media engagements gives your team more time to focus on other social media tasks and overall strategy.

For more details on how to boost your online reputation, download our Multi-Location Marketers Guide to Online Reputation Management.

4. Perform Sentiment Analysis 

Knowing your customers and their feelings about your brand is vital to your online reputation management strategy. As AI tracks and helps draft responses to social media engagements and comments, it can also track and analyze users’ sentiments. 

With AI-supported sentiment analysis capabilities, you can better understand customer sentiment trends, allowing you to make more data-driven decisions and changes to your products or services based on customer feedback.

5. Leverage Social Listening Capabilities

Not only do you want to analyze customer sentiment, but you also want to know what the general public is saying about you and your competitors. 

With social listening AI software, you can:

• Monitor conversations about you and your competitors on social media platforms.
• Extract social media insights from a diverse pool of user interactions.
  
• Help identify influencers or potential brand advocates willing to discuss your brand or publish user-generated content.

The data from social listening tools focused on social media platforms empower your company to proactively engage with consumers, heighten brand awareness, and further improve your online reputation.

Top Benefits of AI in Social Media

We’ve covered some of the best ways to use AI in social media marketing. Here are a few of the main benefits of leveraging AI in social media:

Save time

As mentioned earlier, AI can save your team members time. AI allows you to concentrate on your overall social media strategy and campaigns as it helps you generate content and perform data analysis quicker.

More data and better insights

AI has the power to analyze large swaths of data and find unique patterns or trends you might not have noticed. It can detect nuances in sentiment, context, and user behavior. With this data, AI also makes unique recommendations that elevate your team’s decision-making processes.

Reduce costs

Lastly, AI can minimize social media costs by automating repetitive tasks such as content scheduling, responding to engagements, and analyzing data to make better recommendations. 

This streamlined efficiency reduces resource allocation, boosts your social media marketing team’s productivity, and enhances campaign effectiveness — ultimately boosting ROI. 

As you can see, investing in AI software for social media is a must. 

Investing in AI for Social Media

Speaking of investing in AI software, if you’re a multi-location enterprise looking to navigate AI across 100s or 1,000s of business locations, SOCi can help.

The SOCi Genius platform uses best-in-class generative AI and advanced data science to help your multi-location marketing team make more data-driven decisions and reduce time and costs.

We recently introduced SOCi Genius Reviews, which integrates our review response management system with GPT-4, transforming how marketers respond to online reviews.

Stay tuned for more announcements on Genius products built specifically for social media. To learn more about our current and upcoming AI products, visit our SOCi Genius page or request a demo!