From interpreting lab results in healthcare industry to automatically controlling air conditioning temperature, artificial intelligence is changing the face of industries and businesses.
It is also simplifying jobs of marketers by providing tools to make sense of consumer data on social media.
Social media gave marketers a powerful way to reach out to their target audience. However, application of AI has made it possible to reach out to each individual user with personalized content. Here is how AI based tools are transforming social media today:
- Chatbots
Artificially intelligent chatbots are common on social media. There are more than 1, 00,000 Facebook Messenger bots and they are here to stay as messaging is the preferred way of interaction for customers. Chatbots allow businesses to send auto-replies, personalized offers and even solve customer complaints.
More than 2 billion messages are exchanged between users and brands every month on Facebook messenger alone. Companies with AI powered Facebook messenger bots see increased user interaction and sales.
For example, Tommy Hillfiger saw a 3.5 times more conversion on messenger than any other digital channel during New York fashion week.
Even Twitter has launched many features this year to promote interaction of users with brand chatbots.
- Image Recognition
People share more than 3.25 billion photos a day on popular social media platforms! Brands can draw useful information about users, with so much visual data on social media.
Photos shared by followers can give marketers a peek into places they visit, products they use and how they interact with brands.
For example, an apparel brand can discover where their customers wear their products based on photos discovered on social media. Currently, there is no way to find out unless people tag the brand on a rare occasion.
A lot of information on buying behaviours, usage patterns and aspirational value can be found out by marketers only if they could read and discover images like text.
Thankfully AI is making this possible through image recognition technology. Using technologies like Google cloud vision companies can scan millions of images on social media to identify logos, products and objects.
This is similar to Facebook photos auto-tagging that you might be familiar with. With this AI tool marketers can listen to what customers are saying through pictures and videos.
- Advertising
Paid campaigns give the best ROI in digital marketing. Managing campaigns on multiple channel and deciding on best bid for keywords can get difficult at times. Usually campaigns are managed by in-house team or a PPC agency.
AI Tools like Albert and Frank use machine learning to manage paid ad campaign, analyze result and suggest most profitable platform for placing ads. This takes the guess work out of paid campaigns and ensures best return on investment.
- AI Content creation
Social media success is dependent on good content. According to Gartner, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines by 2018.
There are already intelligent programs that can write financial summaries and fact based articles. Many of the tech giants are working on bots that can speak and interact like human.
Microsoft’s artificially intelligent chatbot ‘Tay’ was made live on Twitter to learn from other users and tweet like a human teenage girl.
Although the controversial account had to be shut down after it tweeted inappropriate remarks, Tay showed us that days when bots produce social media content are not far.
As Natural Language Processing develops, machines will be able to write human like social media posts to engage followers. They would also collect real-time data on trending topics and write interesting content that drives engagement on social media. A tool called Rocco has already done this.
Rocco is an AI powered social media marketing assistant that suggests fresh social media content likely to drive engagement among your followers.
- Customer Intelligence
Posts shared on social media platform can give useful information on customers. Marketers no more have to interrupt customers for surveys and conduct focus groups.
AI machines can search social media platforms for data that matters and collate actionable insights.
Converseon is already doing this by applying machine learning to voice-of customer data.
These insights can be used for market segmentation, building customer profiles and competitive analysis.
AI based tools are going to change how we consume information on social media platforms. This is the reason all of the tech giants and social media companies are investing heavily in it.
Facebook has a dedicated AI research team called Facebook Artificial Intelligence Researchers (FAIR). In 2014 LinkedIn bought Bright, an AI based job search portal, to better its job matching capabilities.
Pinterest on the other hand acquired a data software company, Kosei, to boost pin and product recommendations. It is only a matter of time before marketers start using AI based tools widely on these sites.
