AI in social media is reshaping how brands engage with audiences, and don’t we just love it? From automating content creation to analyzing audience behavior, artificial intelligence is helping businesses put their best foot forward on social media with minimal time and effort.
So, how do you shine with AI in social media? No worries. I highlight how you can use it for content generation, recycling, post-scheduling, social listening, customer service, and many more. These use cases will help you optimize your social media presence, save time, and deliver personalized experiences.
TD;LR
- Social media AI is here to stay; it’s changing how businesses approach marketing and customer engagement.
- I discuss ten ways companies use social media, including content generation, chatbots, and influencer marketing.
- Each use case has a case study demonstrating how businesses leverage AI in social media.
Top 10 Ways of Using AI in Social Media
While some businesses use AI to automate repetitive tasks like scheduling social media posts or generating content ideas, others use it for more advanced functions like improving targeting through predictive analytics or personalizing interactions with chatbots. Regardless of what you need artificial intelligence for, here are 10 use cases you’ll find valuable.
#1 Content creation
Social media platforms are an endless flow of content, so standing out in that sea of posts can be pretty challenging. With new posts published every second, you need to consistently deliver fresh, engaging, and relevant social media posts to capture your target audience’s attention.
When you do this, you maintain visibility and build brand loyalty. Generating content constantly ensures you’re part of the ongoing conversation, making it easier for your audience to interact with your brand.
With artificial intelligence, generating posts for social media marketing becomes super easy. It’s like having a creative assistant at your fingertips, ready to craft an engaging social media post each time you need it – one that resonates with your audience, maintains your brand’s voice, and adapts to the latest trends.
Using an AI writing assistant, you can streamline your content creation process, save valuable time, and enhance the quality of your writing.
Let’s see how BestPlaces, a website for location-based information, uses AI to generate content. When a sudden Google algorithm update decimated its traffic, BestPlaces experienced a decline that threatened its place in the market. To recover, they decided to improve their content with artificial intelligence.
They chose an AI tool that helped them streamline and automate their content creation, boosting their social media marketing. With this integration, they were able to create 80,000 header paragraphs that described different locations across the United States. As a result, BetPlaces witnessed an 800% surge in traffic, surpassing all their previous records.
#2 Image and video creation
While text does a good job conveying your messages to social media audiences, visuals do better. Images and videos can convey emotions, tell stories, and simplify complex ideas in ways that text alone often can’t, making them powerful tools for boosting your social media marketing.
Here are some benefits of using images and videos for your social media posts:
- It’s attention-grabbing: There’s an ocean of content out there, and without visuals, your content can easily get lost. Eye-catching images or videos help you stand out, drawing viewers in and encouraging them to engage with your message. In a world where people scroll quickly, strong visuals can distinguish between being noticed or passed over.
- Increased engagement: Videos and images are more captivating, encouraging users to interact with your content and share it with others. They evoke stronger emotional responses and make your message more memorable, resulting in higher likes, comments, and shares than text-based posts.
- It communicates more effectively: Visual content transcends language barriers and conveys messages quickly and universally. Using visual content, you can communicate with a broader audience, ensuring your message is understood and resonates with people from different backgrounds.
You already know AI can improve your image and video generation for social media. But how? AI video and image generators let you create multiple graphics and videos in minutes, streamlining your content production and saving you hours of manual work.
These generative AI tools let you quickly produce high-quality visuals customized to your brand with templates, design suggestions, and automated editing features.
With AI tools, FedEx teams could maintain brand consistency at scale and fast-track design and approval processes. By creating and editing images and videos using AI tools, they witnessed a 77% reduction in brand review times. They also turned out hundreds of designs monthly, enhancing their social media marketing efforts.
#3 Post scheduling
Time matters on social media. A good post might perform poorly if posted at the wrong time. That’s why it’s essential to understand when your audience is most active. However, posting consistently on various social media platforms is no joke. It takes a lot of time and effort.
Little wonder social media marketers welcome AI scheduling tools with open arms. These AI tools can analyze audience behavior, predict peak engagement times, and automatically schedule posts to go live when they’re most likely to get noticed.
By taking the guesswork out of timing, AI ensures that your content reaches the right people at the right moment, boosting visibility, engagement, and overall social media marketing performance.
Artifact Uprising, a photo products company, wanted to grow its social media presence and build an online community, especially on Instagram. But the team knew it would take a lot of timely content, which was almost impossible. They sought help from an AI scheduling tool and saw significant changes.
The tool helped them schedule their posts so that they could deliver the right photos to their audience at the right time every day. This freed them time to interact with their audience and dedicate their efforts to other social media marketing strategies. As a result, they made 297,000 posts on the ‘Tell on’ hashtag, gaining 8,000 followers in just one year.
#4 Social listening
Social listening isn’t new. Brands have always cared what people (especially their target audience) thought about them and their products. It’s a key social media marketing strategy that helps companies understand customer sentiment, track conversations about their products or industry, and identify trends.
By actively listening to online discussions, you can gain valuable insights, address concerns in real-time, and adapt your messaging to better connect with your audience. This helps improve your social media marketing.
In the past, when social listening was done without AI, social media marketers invested a lot of hard work with little results. They would search each social media platform for topics they wanted to track. After that rigorous exercise, they’d have to compile and thoroughly search through the results to understand what their target audience was saying. What a chore!
But AI came and saved the day. Now, AI-powered tools can automate the process of monitoring and analyzing social media conversations across multiple platforms in real time. They quickly sift through large amounts of data, identify relevant trends, and provide actionable insights with impressive speed and accuracy.
This reduces the social listening process and enables marketing teams to respond more effectively, make data-driven decisions, and stay ahead of the competition.
Careem, a multi-service platform in the Middle East, had a noble goal: to “make a difference in people’s lives.” To do that, they had to listen to what their target audiences were saying and manage engagement with their growing online community across several social channels.
They chose an AI tool to do the job. The tool helped them listen to and engage with brand advocates and discover actionable insights, saving them hours. They were also able to resolve issues quickly and communicate clearly with customers.
Today, Careem has 6.29 million followers across social channels and handles 400,000 monthly social conversations. This is an impressive 350% increase in inbound traffic in the past two years.
#5 Brand awareness
Every brand worth its salt has a social media presence, no matter how small. And it makes absolute sense—63.7% of the global population uses social media. With such a large audience actively engaged online, having a solid social media presence is crucial for brands to connect with potential customers, build brand awareness, and foster relationships.
Social media provides an invaluable platform for reaching and engaging with audiences, sharing content, and driving growth. However, it takes a lot of work for brands to reach a broad audience without AI.
AI tools make the process much easier by analyzing user behavior, automating tasks, and optimizing content for specific audiences.
With AI, brands can create more personalized and engaging content that resonates with their audience, target the right users with precision, and post at optimal times for maximum visibility.
Let’s look at Oscher Health, a non-profit academic healthcare organization. It wanted to be acceptable to its target audience, show its human, authentic side, and correct misinformation to boost brand awareness.
The team chose an AI platform to help them track and optimize their social media activity. This tool helped them monitor and respond to negative sentiment, humanizing their content across multiple channels.
The result? With social media AI, they were able to reach new audiences with brand ambassadors, reduce corporate risk by tracking negative sentiments, and provide reassurance during uncertain times. This significantly improved their brand’s reputation across social media channels, positioning them in a positive light.
#6 Social media management
Social media is exciting; no lies. It’s cool that you can reach many of your target audiences there. However, the excitement ends when the weight of managing it stares you in the face. Managing one social media platform is hard work. Now, imagine handling multiple platforms. From creating content that resonates with diverse groups to tracking engagement metrics and handling customer inquiries, it can quickly become overwhelming.
Unfortunately, you can’t shy away from social media management. Staying consistent, planning, and engaging meaningfully with your audience is the only way to get the best results. That’s not all; creating a balance between quality content, timely responses, and leveraging analytics to fine-tune your approach is also essential.
Thankfully, social media AI does a fantastic job here, so you can heave a sigh of relief. From scheduling posts to analyzing engagement data, AI tools streamline the process, saving time and ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks.
These AI tools help you manage the entire process like that one-stop shop where you get all your supplies without having to hop from store to store (you know that one). From content creation and scheduling to monitoring engagement and generating reports, these tools streamline everything in one place.
So, no more juggling multiple platforms or getting bogged down by manual tasks—just efficient management that frees you up to focus on social media marketing strategy.
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s check out a company that has used AI to manage its social media and has seen great results.
With growing client demands, insurance company Mapfre knew it needed to restructure and manage its accounts on social media platforms. First, the team conducted a digital audit and uncovered over 80 official social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, in addition to multiple region-specific profiles.
That’s an impossible number to manage. What did they do? They went the AI way. They chose an AI tool that helped them consolidate their account management under one platform. With this, Mapfre gained a clear picture of its social media activity, creating transparency in its processes and improving its global customer service strategy. As a result, they have over two million followers on social media, with a 31% increase in online interactions.
#7 Social media advertising
If 5.17 billion people currently use social media worldwide, then running ads there makes absolute sense. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. It’s super crowded out there, and cutting through the noise requires a well-thought-out social media marketing strategy.
With countless brands vying for attention, standing out means creating ads that are not only visually appealing but also relevant and targeted. Enter AI.
Through machine learning and data-driven insights, artificial intelligence helps tailor ads to specific audiences, optimize ad placement, and even predict trends. AI marketing tools take the guesswork out of targeting, ensuring your ads reach the right people at the right time.
Plus, this technology can analyze real-time performance, allowing social media marketers make quick adjustments to maximize ROI.
Apricotton, an undergarment brand, needed help achieving its goal of becoming the number one ‘tween’ bra brand globally. The team knew they needed to leverage ads to increase their social media presence, and they chose an artificial intelligence-powered platform to do so.
Now, Apricotton runs ads directly through the platform and tracks insights and metrics from its organic and paid content. It uses analytics to drive audience engagement, determine target audiences, and optimize the best times to publish content.
By using artificial intelligence for its social media ads, Apricotton had 66,00 impressions across social media platforms in two weeks, saved hours a week, and witnessed increased sales by 108%.
#8 Customer Service With Chatbots
Chatbots are cute. What’s cuter is the number of activities they can perform in seconds.
These AI-powered tools use natural language processing (NLP) to understand, interpret, and respond to customer queries. And if they encounter queries they can’t handle, they quickly consult connected databases.
But what’s their business on social media? Aren’t they limited to websites? Of course not. Chatbots are increasingly being integrated into social media platforms, where they handle customer service, answer FAQs, and even assist with product recommendations—all in real-time. This means you can engage with your audience 24/7, improving customer experience while reducing response time.
Phare Circus, a social enterprise, sure leveraged this technology. It used chatbots to boost ticket sales on Facebook. Initially, they relied on phone calls to serve their clients. They soon realized that the approach was neither effective nor sustainable.
So, they integrated their booking system with an artificial intelligence platform which enabled them to have a chatbot on their Facebook page. The result? They generated more leads and increased ticket bookings by 30%.
#9 Influencer marketing
In the past, only celebrities were considered to be influencers. Now, the music has changed; social media users can gain massive followership and become influencers in the space. These influencers (whether macro or micro) have built loyal communities that trust their opinions and recommendations.
Expectedly, brands are tapping into this new marketing goldmine, leveraging influencers to create authentic connections with target audiences and boost their social media marketing efforts.
Influencer marketing allows you to reach consumers in a more relatable and personal way, often resulting in higher engagement and trust compared to traditional ads. With the right influencer, you can amplify your message and resonate with specific niches.
But that’s the thing – finding the right influencer takes a lot of time and effort. It’s not just about follower count; you need someone whose values align with your brand, whose audience matches your target market, and who has genuine engagement with their followers.
Researching, vetting, and negotiating with influencers requires careful planning to ensure the partnership delivers results. However, it can lead to powerful collaborations that drive real impact when done right.
AI tools can help you here. AI algorithms can match your business with the best-fit influencers based on target audience demographics, engagement rates, and content relevance.
With artificial intelligence, you can use historical data and predictive analytics to forecast how well a campaign will perform before it even begins. Furthermore, AI-powered tools can identify fraudulent activity, such as inflated follower counts or engagement rates achieved through bots or fake accounts, ensuring that your resources are not wasted on phony influencers.
Let’s take a cue from Marriott Bonvoy, a travel brand that wanted to optimize its digital marketing campaign and improve KPIs. To do this, it needed to collaborate with niche influencers in various markets. The team sought help from an AI-driven influencer marketing platform.
At the end of the campaign, they had an 11 million plus cumulative audience reach, 489 pieces of content published, and 2.68 million plus engagement.
#10 Social media analytics and reporting
No business can grow without analytics and reporting. Here’s how it works: by tracking key metrics such as engagement, reach, conversions, and customer behavior, businesses gain valuable insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
This data-driven approach allows for more intelligent decision-making, helping to optimize marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and ultimately drive growth. Regular reporting ensures that you can adjust tactics in real-time and stay ahead of trends.
So, social media is no different. By leveraging analytics tools to monitor performance metrics, you can understand which content resonates with your audience, refine your engagement strategies, and measure the impact of your campaigns. This enables you to make informed adjustments, maximize your reach, and improve your social media marketing.
It gets much better with artificial intelligence. AI-driven analytics tools offer deeper insights by analyzing vast amounts of data at lightning speed, identifying patterns and trends that might be missed with traditional methods.
These tools can predict future engagement, suggest content optimizations, and even automate reporting processes. They help you improve your strategies with precision, adapt quickly to changes, and drive even greater results.
IAG, an insurance company, wanted to use social media content and training to authentically engage broker audiences. The company partnered with an AI-powered social media management platform. Together, they launched campaigns, relying heavily on the platform’s analytics feature to measure content performance and monitor usage and adoption statistics.
The insights gained from this tool’s analytics helped them experience a 95% increase in participant engagement and an 80% increased reach from advocate posts.
Conclusion
AI in Social media has made business processes smoother by automating content creation, optimizing ad targeting, and enhancing customer interactions, among other benefits. This has allowed companies to maintain a consistent online presence, respond to customer inquiries promptly, and adapt strategies based on real-time data.
But there’s more to come. AI in Social media undoubtedly has more long-term potential for businesses. Whatever the future holds, be ready to explore and implement artificial intelligence solutions to unlock new growth opportunities, improve your strategies, and stay ahead of the competition.
Iliya Valchanov
Iliya teaches 1.3M students on the topics of AI, data science, and machine learning. He is a serial entrepreneur, who has co-founded Team-GPT, 3veta, and 365 Data Science. Iliya’s latest project, Team-GPT is helping companies like Maersk, EY, Charles Schwab, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Columbia University adopt AI in the most private and secure way.