AI In The Online Space: What It Means For Social Media And Brand Strategy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our world, including how we use social media.

Many find AI fascinating and exciting, while others see it as scary or downright dangerous. But AI has no intent. It is not sentient in the way humans are and the power behind AI comes down to the humans who wield that power.

Microsoft’s Bing Chat made news recently when it had some unsettling conversations with a journalist. The AI professed its love for the journalist among other strange conversations. This is just one of the latest stories that has led many people to question AI and how we are using it.

ChatGPT is another form of AI that has left teachers and students concerned over plagiarism. In fact, it led one student to create a plagiarism checker specifically because of ChatGPT.

AI has also been used to create art. This has led to discussion among artists over the ethics of AI art.

AI sources its information from the Internet and other connected or online sources. That means that AI is using others' writing, information and art to chat and create with users. While these types of AI have led us into a grey area of sorts, we’ve actually all been using AI online for quite some time.

It’s important to remember that there are several different types of AI. Here are just a few of the types of AI we already use on social media platforms and online:

• • Video filters
  • Virtual try-on filters
  • Text to speech
  • Personalised recommendations
  • Customer service chatbots
  • Image and speech recognition

In fact, social media exists largely because of AI. Algorithms are a form of artificial intelligence. These algorithms are what give you personalised recommendations while you are perusing your timeline on Facebook or TikTok. These algorithms also help platforms spot abuse.

As you can see, we’re already used to using AI in our daily lives. It’s when we hear stories about new AI tech or intrusions of privacy that often get our attention for all the wrong reasons. But when used responsibly, AI can actually help marketers boost their strategies.

Let’s take a look at how you can utilise AI to enhance your marketing efforts.

One of the newer AI technologies includes a function called sentiment analysis. This is the process of using artificial intelligence to analyse social media data that helps you determine the sentiment behind what others are posting online. It can help you monitor how people feel about your brand or a product you offer and help you understand the conversations happening around your brand, allowing you to respond accordingly.

While chatbots like Bing Chat can seem a little too human-like in some instances, most consumers don’t mind chatting with a chatbot on Facebook or online stores to help them begin to resolve an issue. These chatbots can provide a personalised experience during an initial customer service request.

Users know that these chatbots can help give them answers to some basic questions, and that they will be rerouted to a human being if they need further assistance. It can make the process of customer service seamless and faster, which can help you score major points with consumers. We recommend setting up a chatbot on Facebook messenger or your online shopping platform to deal with customer service requests.

Today’s consumers expect a personalised experience online and AI can help with that through hyper-targeting audiences in social media ad campaigns. Drilling down to highly-segmented audiences means you can deliver customised ads to consumers with very similar behaviours. AI can even analyse these behaviours and begin to predict them, which can further help you create targeted content that is more effective.

AI tools can help you analyse hundreds or thousands of ad targeting and budget variations, find and segment audiences, make ad creatives, test ads, and improve speed and performance. Thanks to AI, marketers can optimise ads for clicks and conversions based on the technology’s ability to predict which language can drive better results.

Google has had image search for a while now, where users can upload an image and search for it on the web to see where it originated from. A similar AI allows brands to incorporate logo detection, giving them the power to analyse images containing the brand’s products across social media platforms. With this technology, brands can check how often their logos appear on social networks. This can give you insight on brand mentions and the sentiment around image shares.

For brands interested in finding influencers to work with, AI can assist with this task too. Analysing a bunch of influencers and understanding their audiences to find out who would be best for a campaign can be time-consuming and daunting work. But AI has the ability to speed up the process and deliver in-depth insights about influencers and how well they will align with your brand’s goal for a particular campaign. Other AI influencer tools include analysing and calculating ROI and identifying fraudulent influencers.

Some scheduling platforms are starting to test out AI-generated copy. This gives users the ability to generate copy based on an analysis of insights from previous posts. There are platforms out there that can help with generating copy for digital ads as well. You can provide a few seed words to the AI platform and then it will create some phrases, paragraphs or even an entire document based on the subject matter and tone.

Artificial intelligence will continue to evolve and shape the digital marketing world, but it’s important to remember what AI can and cannot do. AI can assist marketers by giving them better information about their target audience, develop more informed and targeted content, and even help start interactions with users.

But what artificial intelligence can’t do is think creatively or come up with new innovative thoughts. Essentially, AI in social media marketing should be used to enhance performance and automate and speed up processes. This frees you up for the creative and human aspects of social media marketing.