How Artificial Intelligence Is Impacting Social Media

• Date: 18 March 2020
• reading time: 5 Minutes
• Blogger: Micheal Dean

Until not so long ago, artificial intelligence was a futuristic concept that, in many people’s minds, revolved around building human-like androids, indistinguishable from the rest of us and capable of thinking and performing tasks that require critical thinking.
 

And while we’ve seen the first humanoid androids, there’s still a long way to go until they develop a mind of their own.

With all the recent tech developments, should we be afraid that AI will take our jobs?
 

In the meantime, artificial intelligence has become commonplace in our regular, everyday lives. We’re relying on its smart algorithms to recommend us the next show on Netflix or what to purchase on Amazon. AI’s current superpower is a capability to gather, process, and interpret a huge amount of structured and unstructured data in no time, and make sense of it.

This advanced technology has disrupted many fields including healthcare, finance, and education, to name just a few, and it’s only logical that digital marketing will also benefit from it.

Will artificial intelligence bring about a new social media revolution?

Content Optimization

Content is crucial for social media platforms as many of its almost 3 billion users leverage Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn not only to share their own personal updates but to find different information.

This means that it’s essential for social media posts, including news, ads, stories, or videos, to be properly optimized and classified so that they’re shown to the right audience.

Just like Netflix and Amazon, social media also makes use of sophisticated machine learning-powered algorithms to make sure that every single user gets personalized content and information on their feed.

This means that Facebook’s powerful algorithm will monitor the content and social accounts and pages that you engage with, analyze your past behavior on this social platform, and identify the patterns in all this vast amount of data. Based on this, it will predict a list of people, groups, and accounts that are most likely to be interesting to you, and will show them as recommendations to you.

LinkedIn uses similar technology to suggest jobs to its users, as well as to help recruiters to sift through a number of applicants and filter out those who don’t match their required qualifications or skill sets.

It’s worth mentioning that AI tools can automatically generate some simple stories such as sports or stock reports, thus allowing writers to focus on more complex content. Also, there are tools that facilitate the creation of videos as it’s now possible to automatically transform an article into an engaging video.

All this makes it much easier for social media marketers to create relevant updates and engage their audience without wasting time.

Intelligent Chatbots

An increasing number of businesses take advantage of social media platforms in order to offer superb customer support and interact with their audiences on an entirely new level.

New technologies and customer expectations have raised the bar when it comes to this kind of customer service, and it’s no longer acceptable to ignore a certain social media comment or put users on hold until there’s an available customer support rep who could handle their query.

That’s why many companies decided to streamline communication with their customers and prospects with the help of AI-powered chatbots. These pieces of software are pre-programmed to offer answers to the most commonly asked questions, collect user information, and facilitate communication with brands.

However, chatbots don’t have to be your regular algorithms that use a canned script – Sephora’s Virtual Artist, for example, combines augmented reality to help customers pick the best make up shade by uploading a selfie and trying on various looks.

By implementing the right chatbot strategy, it’s possible to enhance customer experience tremendously.

Sentiment Analysis

By opening the lines of communication with their customers on social media, brands can offer exceptional customer service, obtain valuable feedback, and prevent customer churn by identifying potential product issues.

That’s why even negative comments and complaints can lead to a positive outcome.

However, if we bear in mind that 96% of unhappy customers never complain, at least not directly, while 91% of them simply leave, it’s clear that brands can’t rely only on customers admitting what the problem is.

Some of those disgruntled customers will share their negative experiences or opinions on their own social media profiles or comment with others across different social media channels. With the help of AI-powered social listening tools, brands can now find out what their current and former customers are saying about them online.

These tools are used for monitoring and “eavesdropping” on what people are saying about a particular brand online. This way companies can identify how their customers feel about them, prevent social media fail, and even spot a potential PR disaster before it takes place.

Social listening tools employ natural language processing in order to identify positive and negative words within posts and comments on social media, which means that they allow brands to be in the know about how people perceive them.

AI Influencers

Influencer marketing is very popular on social media channels, and many brands collaborate with celebrities and niche influencers in order to promote their products.

But, back in 2018, a new kind of social media influencer emerged – the digitally-created AI influencer.

Lil Miquela is one of them. She’s a digital avatar, or more precisely, an anthropomorphic interface that looks like an attractive young woman.

She launched her Instagram profile in 2016 and managed to amass almost 2 million followers. Big fashion brands such as Prada hire Lil Miquela for their photoshoots, and she was even featured on the covers of Vogue and V. Apart from being a fashionista, this versatile bot is also an outspoken advocate of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This trend is only in its infancy, and it’s yet to be seen how it will evolve, but for brands, it’s a dream come true. They can now have full control over the messaging of their influencers, without worrying that these virtual, CGI celebrities will engage in some inappropriate behaviors that could hurt their sponsor’s reputation.

Artificial intelligence is still a relatively new field that still hasn’t reached its full potential and has already managed to revolutionize digital marketing and social media. Besides allowing brands to take advantage of social media in a more controlled manner, this new technology also brings benefits to its users as they get hyper-personalized content and suggestions.

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• Blogger: Micheal Dean
• Writer / Marketer at Qeedle
• Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.
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