How Artificial Intelligence (AI) is generating millions in revenue for businesses using Social Media
To differentiate themselves on social media, businesses are turning to artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we will look at the ways in which AI can enhance social media marketing, taking you to the next level in revenue generation, reduced ad-spend and discovering new trends and markets.
Having a social media strategy is pivotal to the success of any business.. Social channels are part of everyday life and it would be fair to say that many consumers are addicted to them. If somebody isn’t connected socially, they are perceived as a minority in an exponentially growing digital era. According to Statista, 70% of the US population has at least one social media profile, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other.
Ultimately, connecting with your audience is far easier if you are visible on the channels that they use. However, that doesn’t mean you should blindly market to everybody on social media. The channels still require the same care with targeting and personalisation that has become so prevalent with email over the course of the last decade. That is easier said than done given that all your competitors are trying to do the same. But, are all your competitors using Artificial Intelligence? And the answer is NO; which gives you the upper hand by implementing AI.
What is AI?
While we won’t go into huge technical detail here, it is probably worth giving a brief overview of what we mean when referring to AI. Essentially, it is the science of getting machines to act and understand things like humans do. It is something we use every day from doing a Google Search to talking with Siri and shopping on Amazon, all of which use some form of AI.
Many applications of AI in its current state are powered by what we call machine learning. This is using existing data to predict future behaviours and generate automated decisions. If we put that into a social media context, all the ad buying and content creation that digital teams do, could be automated using AI software and tools. By ingesting behaviour and purchase patterns amongst other data, machines can self-learn and continually improve their own performance without human intervention. Another amazing benefit of AI is that the information being analysed by AI does not have to be your data; it can be your competitor’s data. Providing you insight on what strategies are working for them and implementing those strategies yourself.
Social media platforms themselves are filled with AI. Some examples that we see on social media include how Facebook tags photos. The integrated AI is now able to analyse a picture and recognise faces, automatically tagging them. Instagram now does the same. While we might take it for granted, the way that LinkedIn displays “People we may know” is a form of machine learning, using data to connect us to others. Twitter can show us relevant Tweets based on our past behaviour.
Here are some of the ways that social media marketers can also make use of AI via the platforms.
Social Media content created will laser-focus precision- targeting “Ready-to-Buy” audiences
A lot of time is spent by marketing teams in researching and creating content. There are many tools that can take this content and schedule it across various social media channels, but AI can take the next step.
AI tools can scan your social media profiles (and your competitors’ social media profiles) to see what types of advertisements work best. For example, do videos get more shares than text or are value added offers better than financial reward posts? It does this by analysing historical data through machine learning and natural language processing. Artificial Intelligence allows you to “spy” on your competitors to see what has worked for them, and what is increasing revenue and profits; giving you a direct comparison to help you gain an advantage.
Based on your chosen industry, previous posts and competitor knowledge, AI tools will be able to scour the web for recent news associated to the topics your brand will be interested in. The information it finds can be used to automatically generate new posts, fitting your brand voice. The more data that the AI tools have available, the more intelligent they become. This means your posts will continue to get better without any human intervention required.
Using AI platforms to their full extent like this could cut content creation down by as much as 90%, getting hours of work completed in next to no time. As AI can extract data from millions of articles and blogs quickly, the likelihood of creating relevant and engaging posts is far greater than those created by humans.
AI is not designed to replace human input in this instead but rather augment it. Marketing teams can focus on strategy and new technology rather than spending time on tedious and monotonous tasks such as research and writing content.
Paid Advertisement (Ad spend): Never guess; only PREDICT with Artificial Intelligence
In a similar method to content, AI can predict and recommend the best types of ads to use for each specific target audience.
AI tools exist that can help target your spend and targeting. For example, AI can process your spend and targeting data, review the results and then suggest what you should do to improve your revenue. AI also has the ability to “spy” on your competitors and identify how much they spend and where they spend. At scale, this can provide a lot of value when you have campaigns running across many different channels.
AI has been shown to unlock channels that advertisers didn’t even think could provide a return. Where tools can process large amounts of data, they can present insights that might have been lost by the human eye. For example, an age demographic that responds to a certain type of campaign but got buried beneath mountains of other data. AI will be able to optimise all advertising.
Some technology can take this further. New AI tools on the market can present ads to consumers on an individual basis. For example, based on how somebody behaves, what they buy, their demographics and many other attributes, AI can present different text and images that they are likely to respond and eventually purchase.
In fact, some are even smarter and can present ads based on consumer emotions. Some people prefer ads in a specific tone and that could even vary at different times of the day. How they respond can be used to gain an idea of their likely emotional reaction when presented with a new ad.
Competitor Intelligence- the strategy that builds empires
AI systems can help businesses compile more granular competitor research than ever before. The days of browsing the social media posts of the competition are long gone as AI can quickly extract the text of Facebook posts, Tweets or Instagram images to see what is trending and what is performing. There are numerous benefits to this activity outside of the time and cost saving against the manual work of a human counterpart.
One example might be in tracking competitor promotions. If they are going to start a new offer, it is likely they will start doing warm up posts in advance. If you are using AI to monitor competitors in real-time, you can stay ahead of the game.
It has become commonplace for customers to raise complaints on social media as they feel this gets a faster response, given it is in the public eye. Monitoring competitor complaints can provide valuable data on how your service is advantageous over theirs and what to avoid.
If you have competitors posting on social media, AI tracking tools can monitor the volume of likes and shares they receive for different types of campaign. As that information is open to the public, it is relatively easy to extract. Adding this to your own datasets helps to provide insight on what customers in your industry like seeing the most on social media and can drive your advertising decisions.
New Trends, New Audiences, New Markets, New Revenue…More Profits
One of the more emerging fields of AI is in brand-image translation. If you are operating in a local or global industry, it is important to realise that different localisation and cultures have varying demands, desires and different methods of communicating. It is important to optimise and manipulate your advertising and brand-image so that it appeals to each audience, allowing them to connect with your brand. AI consulting teams such as Quantum AI Strategy creates multiple versions of a social media ads and target mixed cultures, mixed generations and mixed markets.
AI tools can not only help with creating context but also have the capability of using context to distinguish between complex linguistic differences. For example, one campaign ad will appeal to a baby boomer triggering the baby boomer to purchase the product/service. The exact same product/service will then be marketed to a Millennial, but with a different tone, jargon, terminology and context all together prompting the Millennial to purchase the same product. We are getting close to what is known as AI-powered content localisation which would allow social media marketing to introduce businesses to consumers across the globe.
The AI available on social media is giving consumers the opportunity to fix errors. Direct translations in multiple languages are tricky meaning early tests of the AI are prone to error. It will be hard for machines to automatically pick up how to translate English idioms into French for example meaning human intervention is integral to get it right. As users offer solutions, the AI platforms learn from mistakes and continue to improve.
Social Sentiment Analysis
AI applications like natural language processing (NLP) can be used to conduct a social sentiment analysis of your brand. This involves taking all posts and mentions to ascertain whether there is a positive or negative opinion of a campaign.
For example, if customers were posting on Twitter that your app is slow and keeps crashing, sentiment analysis would recognise the terms “slow” and “crashing” as negative keywords, decreasing the brand score. A sentiment analysis adds a point for positive words and removes a point for negative words to give each post a score. This can be totalled to provide you with an overall benchmark.
Sentiment analysis is perfect for social media as it goes beyond tracks likes and shares. It tells you what the customers are saying and gives your business the capability to read between the lines.
While teams could do this activity manually, AI and machine learning can extract masses of posts to perform a real-time sentiment analysis. This could be vital straight after launching a new product or doing an app update for example.
Virtual Assistants (Chatbots)
According to a report from Hubspot, 47% of consumers would be willing to purchase a product directly from a chatbot. These are the pre-programmed messenger applications that can quickly answer customer queries without the need to speak with a human. The most popular example is Facebook Messenger so social media as so many consumers use the channel meaning it makes good sense for business applications.
Chatbots use an application of AI known as natural language processing (NLP) to understand what the user has said and return the most relevant response. Marketers can use this to their advantage and program the bot to say specific messages based on how the user is responding. Disney created a bot when they released the feature film Zootopia in 2016 which presented teaser trailers based on the user answers.
There are several benefits to deploying social media chatbots.
- 24/7 response. Chatbots don’t need to sleep and can speak to your audience no matter what time they want to talk.
- In-app experience. If brands can incorporate a chatbot into social media, it keeps them within the platform. Consumers hate having to bounce between apps so if brands can create a single one app experience, it keeps everyone happy
- Real time journeys. Chatbots can reach out to customers in real-time. For example, a chatbot can push out an instant message if a customer doesn’t purchase. Email could never do this.
- Conversation. Chatbots can get away with more pertinent questions than something like email as they are conversational by nature. This could be valuable in finding out more about your customers, adding data to fuel further AI technology.
Chatbots have become a must have of any social media marketing strategy.
Summary
AI tools could take us to a world where marketers don’t have to put in any manual effort to manage their social media accounts. Contents can be automatically created, translation tools help you connect with everyone, sentiment analysis provides real-time feedback and you can predict likely ROI of a campaign before it has even started. Marketing teams can focus on the strategic elements of their role rather than the research and admin of creating and managing campaigns.
Of course, there are risks with automating too much. It could create a place where brands don’t even know what they are saying to consumers because AI does it for them. AI must be used as an amazing time and cost saving social media marketing tool that augments existing processes, rather than completely replacing them.
However, the benefits of AI discussed in this article heavily outweigh the risks and the time to start embracing technology in social media marketing has come.