Social media is the marketing tool of choice for most companies these days. With the growing number of social media channels, social media influencers, and the explosion of content everywhere, marketers can well find it hard to cope with this onslaught of change. Certainly marketing companies stuck in the previous paradigm will find it impossible. Not everyone is that good dealing with change and some people just do not know how to accept that the world is different and how things used to be done is now an aspect of the past. Social media marketing is the present and future, and companies must adjust or be left behind.
It must be noted that just increasing the number of people to take care of the social media needs of a company doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, the more people are involved, the more complicated it gets. That’s the reason why many companies are now turning to artificial intelligence to improve their social media performance. By using AI-powered tools to increase social media effectiveness, companies can save time and use humans for more vital tasks, which is not wasting time on Facebook or shopping on Amazon! That does not help the bottom line at all!
The seven ways in which AI-powered tools are improving social media marketing efficiency are:
1. Content creation
One of the most important aspects of social media marketing that is also the most time-consuming is content creation. It cannot be denied that content creation forms a vital part of any marketing campaign, and the volume of content is increasing by the minute. Years ago, there would be one campaign in six months, now there are six campaigns a month. Using automated tools to generate content saves time and helps produce faster results.
2. Content optimization
Another critical element of social media marketing is content optimization. This is necessary to ensure more visibility and more traffic to a website or social media channels. Without proper optimization, content that deserves more focus might fall behind. This is when bots are most useful, to analyze content, find the content that deserves more attention and optimize it accordingly.
3. Customer service
This is one area where improvements are constantly necessary. Customer service forms a vital part of any business, and even though chatbots or other AI tools aren’t replacing humans anytime soon, they are revolutionizing customer service. Bots are increasingly being used to help customers find quick answers to queries, handle a large volume of calls, and even converse with callers. Too bad bots could not make “Thor III” (he could not take on 10 guys or get out of a net?!) or “Planet of the Apes III” (so the avalanche kills all the humans but not one ape? — ridiculous)!
Chatbots are also helping brands target social media users to improve their shopping experiences, help them with personalized product suggestions, and use all the interaction data to capture more details insights.
However, businesses must remember that a robot can never be a replacement for a human being, and customers will always seek that personal touch.
While AI-powered customer service is a judicious concept, it must not be overdone. In sync with this thought process, there are already chatbot platforms that can build complicated workflows to make sure that the bots are able to bring in a real service agent when they predict that the customer on the other side is not getting satisfactory responses.
4. Consumer data
The huge amount of unstructured data and the constantly changing algorithms make it increasingly difficult to reach the right target audience. AI-powered tools are used for segregating noise from relevant data and create an ideal customer profile by mining consumer information. These tools analyze the available data to follow patterns that create the ideal customer avatar. A customer avatar makes it easy for companies to filter through the noise and reach the right audience.
5. Influencer marketing
Businesses seek to associate with the influencers that match with their brand. To make that match stronger and more accurate, AI tools are used. AI tools search through hundreds of social media influencers to find that one that matches the DNA of the business.
Social media marketing isn’t going to be taken over by machines anytime soon, but the right mix of humans and AI tools can make the process of social media marketing smarter and more efficient.
6. Social media monitoring
Social media continues to be the most valuable platform for getting the attention of prospects in real time and helping then through the sales funnel, eventually making a sale. Social media monitoring tools, powered by advanced AI algorithms, are already helping brands detect positive/negative/neutral sentiment in posts made by social media users, with a mention of the brand name.
Over time, these tools “learn” to accurately identify the sentiment in a post and can trigger workflows to let your social media marketing personnel target high-potential leads. By quickly acting on positive brand mentions as well as negative sentiments (by acknowledging and addressing the grievance of the message-poster), brands can truly take control over social media.
7. Buyer personas
It’s been proven in many research studies that buyer personas can deliver tremendous improvements in social media marketing ROIs. However, key persona attributes such as habits, work environments, and purchase motivators are hard to define and even harder to use for tagging each user with. This is where AI-powered social media tools help.
Using information from the public domain, your existing segmentation data, and machine learning-based algorithms, these tools can help you segregate users into highly nuanced and niche groups called buyer personas. These personas make it super-easy for brands to target their marketing and promotional messaging at the right audiences, at the right time, and via the right channel.
Ride the social media marketing wave
Now’s the time when AI is beginning to make sweeping changes not only across markets but also within core business functions such as marketing. The power of “social’ with the power of “AI” have merged, and the implications for companies, marketers, and social media experts are huge. Act in time, beat your competitors, and ride on this super-fast train like a pro.
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