Humans are always on the lookout for paths of least resistance. From the invention of the wheel and the development of irrigation systems to robotics, it is this need for simplification that shines through. The same goes for the latest addition, artificial intelligence (AI), a technology first developed to solve boring mathematical problems and identify chemicals in medicines.

Today, AI has set its mark in almost all industries, including social media marketing. It has changed how brands approach social media content creation, planning and distribution. Social media AI has helped them automate repetitive tasks and hyper-personalize audience interaction. In fact, 81% of marketers who use AI in their work are satisfied with the impact it creates.

But here’s a fact: even if a majority of brands today are eager to incorporate AI into their social media strategy, around 39% fail to do so due to improper strategies and lack of training. And that’s where we help.

Through this blog, we discuss the future of AI in social media marketing, highlighting the ever-evolving role of AI in 3 crucial steps of social media marketing: content planning, content creation and content distribution with examples.

How do brands use AI in social media content planning

With multiple social channels, growing competitors, evolving audience preferences, and the vast amount of social media data, it is no longer easy to plan social media content manually. You need to assess various data points to create content that hits the mark, and AI-assisted content planning tools help you do exactly that.

Here are the 3 main ways in which brands today use AI to plan social media content:

1. For social listening and analytics to create fail-proof social media strategies

Social listening refers to tracking brand-related conversations on social media and gauging audience sentiment towards your brand from them. Social media marketers do this by sifting through brand mentions, feedback and industry trends to enhance their social media efforts.

For example, a beauty brand that launched a new sunscreen can figure out what customers think about it by monitoring product-related comments and mentions on Instagram. They can then use the negative feedback to better their product or the good ones to personalize their social media marketing copy.

With AI-powered social listening tools coming to the scene, social listening has evolved from being just a mechanism for deriving the audience’s sentiments. These days, many tools like Sprinklr, Hootsuite Insights and Hubspot Social Listening allow you to identify trends, calculate share of voice and even find influential voices in your industry.

Here’s a bit about these AI-powered capabilities and how they impact your social media strategy:

• Trend spotting

Unlike global trends, spotting trends that pertains to your brand is not easy. Many times, you get to know them late or don’t know about them at all. Most AI-powered social listening tools are attuned to the timely identification of these trending subjects.

They identify trends that fall within your industry but lie outside your immediate brand conversations and give a breakdown of topic performance. This information helps you weed out trends that aren’t worth pursuing and zero in on the ones that matter.

A good example of this is the movement for inclusivity in sportswear and how popular sports apparel brands capitalized on this trend. The movement began when influencers from all walks of life, from ethnicities to abilities, stressed the need for inclusive activewear through platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Soon, major brands took over these conversations and even launched clothing lines to support this. Nike’s ‘Pro Hijab’ and Lululemon’s Align Leggings were byproducts of this trend.

• Competitor strategy analysis and share of voice

The old adage’ comparison is the thief of joy’ doesn’t hold true in the case of social media marketing. Launching your campaigns without any intel on your competitors’ moves is like throwing darts in the dark.

AI social listening tools help you uncover your competitors’ strategies and give you details about the performance of their current campaigns, launches, and the trends they are capitalizing on. They also calculate your brand’s share of voice, a metric that determines your brand’s reach in a specific platform or market to understand how you stand in comparison to your competitors.

With this information, you can devise a new fail-proof strategy or optimize your current ones for better conversions. For example, by tracking the effectiveness of a competitor campaign, you can identify the messaging, timing, platform and content type that best resonates with your audience.

• Influencer sourcing

With the creator industry booming, (set to reach 500 billion dollars by 2027) and the increased trust of buyers in influencer recommendations (69% of them), influencer marketing has become a staple in every marketing mix. But finding the right influencer to represent your brand is not an easy task, especially when they seem like a line of identical dominoes.

But with AI social listening, you can skip this tedious step and find the best ones that resonate with your brand. These tools comb through online conversations related to your brand and industry and find those who align with your brand’s values and audience. They spot an influencer, gauge their credibility through sentiment analysis, and check if they align with your brand through their content (usually found through mentions and hashtags).

2. To perform predictive analysis for better performance

Predictive analysis, in simple terms, is about reading the tea leaves of your past campaigns. You analyze historical data to discover customer behavior patterns and use these insights to optimize your social media copy and campaigns.

Performing predictive analysis manually is time-consuming, and there's always a limit to the data points you can process. But by incorporating AI into the process, you can process millions of data points and even make real-time decisions. It also forecasts the performance of campaigns, making it easy for you to make last-minute tweaks.

Some of the insights you gain from AI predictive analysis include the best times to post, the best type of content and tone, hashtags to use and influencers to tag. Here's an example to illustrate this:

Suppose you are a cosmetic brand planning to promote your new range of lipstick on Instagram to an audience aged 18 to 35. Through predictive analysis, you discover that your audience engages most between 5 to 7 PM during weekdays and prefers before-after videos in a conversational tone. You also found out that the hashtags that resonate most with your audience are #lipstickaddict #leadfreelipstick and #lipstickjunkie, and you should collaborate with micro-influencers for the best results.

With these insights in hand, you can easily make informed decisions to ensure better engagement and conversions.

3. For content scheduling to boost engagement

AI-powered content scheduling is much more than posting during optimal timings on autopilot. Content scheduling software these days acts as end-to-end tools that help you from content planning through distribution. Here are some features these tools possess:

• Multi-channel management

An average social media user uses at least 6 or 7 social media channels monthly, according to Forbes. This means that if you don't have a diverse social media footprint, you will miss out on sales.

However, managing multiple social channels, even when they have built-in scheduling tools, is like navigating a ship with multiple rudders. AI-powered scheduling tools help you skip this and let you manage multiple social media channels in one place.

These tools support dynamic scheduling, where they auto-adjust the scheduling time based on seasonal changes, trends, and audience and competitor behavior. For example, let's say Black Friday sales start at midnight in the US and later in the morning in Europe. Dynamic scheduling accounts for these differences and schedules posts in a regionally appropriate manner to maximize engagement.

• Content calendar

A content calendar gives you a bird's eye view of your scheduled posts, eliminating chances of gaps or content duplication. But creating one manually, especially when you handle multiple channels, is tough, and that's where AI-powered scheduling tools help you.

These tools generate tailored content calendars based on your audience's demographic details, content themes, posting frequency and social media platforms. They also factor in historical data and industry insights to create ones that best serve your brand.

Another major benefit of AI content calendars is their scalability. You can easily add or remove social media platforms from the mix and generate new calendars in no time.

• Collaboration features

What appears to be a simple social media post is often a result of teamwork and countless iterations. Add more social media channels to your marketing mix, and your team will soon get lost in the never-ending feedback loop.

Collaboration features save your team from this. They allow copywriters, graphic designers and social media managers to co-edit posts in real-time. Some tools also provide an approval workflow to speed up the approval process and save the team from countless back and forths via email.

How do brands use AI in social media content creation

The hype and skepticism around AI writing reached its zenith with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Even if AI-writing tools likeCopy.ai existed before, ChatGPT democratized AI writing. With people from all walks of life trying this tool, the debate on whether AI will replace writers became a staple on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit.

While some tweeted with certainty that AI will make writers jobless, some used this as an opportunity to stress on the importance of good writing, like this tweet:

But with more people using ChatGPT and other AI writing tools, the fear of replacement soon transformed into an eagerness to collaborate. Writers slowly realized that AI could be an ally in writing, helping them fast-track time-consuming tasks like research, editing and content repurposing.

With that in mind, let's look at how AI can help you speed up and streamline major social media content creation steps. We'll also touch upon AI-powered visual designing and video editing as these are important aspects of social media content creation.

1. Writing

With countless social media platforms with nuances and demanding posting frequencies ranging from hourly updates to daily posts, social media content creation can be very exhausting. In other words, social media content creators don’t have the privilege to blame writer’s block and need to create content on the fly.

And AI-assisted writing tools, integrated with social media tools, help you during times when you hit such roadblocks. They are excellent brainstorming tools to bounce off some ideas and get your creative juices flowing. You can feed all your half-baked ideas along with product and market insights to generate something solid that you can perfect through revisions.

Suppose you are looking for Instagram and TikTok content ideas to promote a fashion brand’s summer collections to millennials and Genz. AI social media post generators like Buffer analyze brand, platform, and audience details and give you ideas, such as the one shown below. You can further refine the results by expanding, shortening, changing the tone or even adding your unique inputs.

Another notable benefit is how some of these tools auto-adjust content and format to suit different social platforms. For example, on LinkedIn, there’s a text visibility limit of 150 characters on the feed, and users need to click ‘See More’ to read the entire post. Tools take this nuance into account and offer hooks to best leverage this visibility limit.

You can also set up workflows or use pre-built ones to automate your content workflow. These include automating tasks like editing and proofreading, paraphrasing and summarizing, SEO optimization, generating headlines and hashtags, etc.

2. Content Repurposing

Content repurposing isn't limited to traditional text-to-text repurposing, such as social media posts to blogs or vice versa. Today, there are tools to repurpose any asset to your preferred content format, be it a podcast, image, video or blog. Here are some popular types of content repurposing and tools to do it:

• Long-form content to videos

Tools like Pictory.ai and Lumen5 let you convert your blogs into videos. The tools pick the best summary of the blogs and convert them into video formats using images, videos, soundtracks and voiceovers from their library. You can also use your own visuals or voiceovers to add a unique touch to the videos.

• Audio transcripts to social media posts

Repurposing podcasts to social media posts by highlighting the key takeaways from them is a way to drive more listeners to them. You can do this with tools like Audiogram and Headliner which convert podcasts into bite-sized audiograms (short audio clips) which you can share across socials.

• Multilingual translation

The best way to connect with your target audience is to speak their language in the literal sense. In fact, 76% of shoppersprefer a localized shopping experience where they can browse and buy using their native language. This applies to social media marketing as well. Tools like DeepL and Lokalise translate social media posts into languages of your choice, allowing you to cater to your audience better.

3. Visual designing and video editing

The 'Balenciaga Pope' controversy speaks volumes about the potential of AI-assisted visual designing and its risky ethical implications. But for the purpose of this article, let's look at its sunny side and how it accelerates social media content creation.

Source: Guardian

• Democratizes the realm of design

One of the revolutionary changes brought about by AI-assisted visual designing is the democratization of design. These days, anyone can create content, regardless of whether or not they have design skills.

Many tools like Canva and Midjourney let you produce visuals through AI text prompts and offer ready-to-use templates. Here's an example of how your brand can use it to create tailored reusable templates for different content formats and reduce content creation time.

These tools save graphic designers from facing a blank canvas, giving them something to start with. On the other side, it also helps brands with budget constraints to create visuals without professional help.

• Speeds up your video editing process

AI automates some of the crucial, time-consuming steps of video editing. These include:

Quality enhancements: Tools like Descript perform some actions to enhance video and audio quality, like color correction, noise cancellation, removing filler words and pauses, etc.

Seamless B-roll integration: B-rolls or secondary shots are additional shots you can use to add more context to videos. Some AI-powered video editing tools like Ssemble automatically find spots for B-shots and add them without human intervention.

Auto-segmentation: AI-powered tools perform transcript-based editing instead of time-stamp-based editing to speed up the editing process. These tools generate a transcript based on the video, which you can use to locate and edit out unnecessary parts.

How do brands use AI in social media content distribution

Content distribution is the key to making the best of your social media management and marketing efforts. It helps you reach a broader audience, boosting sales and brand loyalty. Incorporating AI into content distribution enables you to overcome the limitations of traditional strategies, such as the inability to scale and being resource-intensive.

Since we already discussed the influence of AI in content management and repurposing (also aspects of content distribution), we’ll look at another AI-driven social media content distribution strategy here:

Create AI-powered social media walls to drive engagement

Social media walls are custom-made social feeds you can create and embed on your websites and digital screens to build website engagement and drive more visitors to your social channels. Social media aggregators help you build by pulling content from the platform of your choice using usernames, hashtags and mentions.

You can create different types of social feeds based on your needs. For instance, to increase sales, you can add user-generated content from Instagram, TikTok or Facebook to your feed and build social proof. Similarly, you can run hashtag contests to build brand awareness and display the best ones on your websites.

Social media feeds are a great addition to your content distribution stack especially if your brand relies heavily on UGC or runs hashtag contests regularly. But sifting through this content to weed out anything spammy, irrelevant or offensive takes ages especially when moderated manually.

That’s where something like Garde AI, Flockler’s feature for AI content moderation comes in handy, removes anything in real-time that might tarnish your brand image from being displayed on social media feeds. It also helps you cut through the noise associated with hashtags and shows only relevant content.

What's the verdict—the future of AI in social media?

There's no two ways about it, AI has become an indispensable tool in the social media marketing toolbox and continues to expand its areas of impact at an incredible pace. It has given us the opportunity to focus on tasks that truly make a difference in your buyer's journey by doing the legwork involved in social media content planning, creation and distribution. AI will further cement its presence in the realm of social media marketing in the near future and the best you can do is be adaptive.

According to Gowthami Vasu, Conversion Rate Specialist at Netcom Learning, the future of AI in social media is all set to redefine brand-audience interaction. According to her,

“In the coming years, AI-powered social media marketing will leverage more advanced technologies like voice and eye recognition to deeply understand user behavior, preferences, and emotions”. In other words, we’ll witness the transformation of AI in social media from an automation tool to a partner who aids in delivering hyper-personalized content and tailored experiences."

FAQs

1. What is social media content moderation ?

Content moderation on social media is about screening user-generated content on various social media platforms and removing content that looks spammy, offensive or irrelevant.

2. How is AI changing marketing?

AI is changing marketing by automating repetitive tasks, finding deeper insights about your audience and hyper-personalizing outreach.