Social media has generated massive amounts of customer intelligence data. As this channel’s global users continue to grow, artificial intelligence (AI) is well-equipped to process the profusion of data, helping uncover deeper insights into customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors.
Innovative marketing leaders recognize the advantage of adopting AI solutions early in their strategy. The demand for AI in social media marketing reflects their priorities: investments are expected to reach $2.1 billion in 2024 and exponentially surge to $7.25 billion by 2029.
Investing In AI for Social Media: Is It Worth It?
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) must lead their teams in measuring gains from AI implementation. To justify the expense, they should go beyond projecting profits and ensure these investments contribute directly to business strategies, such as bolstering sales, enhancing customer satisfaction, and reducing operational costs.
From what AI technologies have shown so far, notwithstanding future potential, their direct contribution comes from different capabilities, including:
- Content Generation – Clever marketers leverage generative AI to craft social media posts from scratch or based on existing content, such as blog posts, landing pages, and other assets. Some tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Perplexity AI streamline writing tasks from research to optimization. Meanwhile, others focus on dishing out images (e.g. DALL-E 2 and MidJourney) or delivering the complete multimodal package (e.g. GPT-4 and DeepAI).
- Hyper-personalization – Future-forward marketing chiefs employ hyper-personalization techniques to great effect. They use social media platforms that combine real-time data, AI, and predictive analytics to surface their most relevant content to target audiences. At the same time, they can tap these AI-powered tools to provide granular user insights for better customer segmentation and product recommendations.
- Influencer Research, Matching, and Performance Analytics – The influencer marketing landscape may look saturated at first glance. However, with artificial intelligence tools like HypeAuditor and Influencity, data-driven marketers can skillfully navigate it and discover potential partners in their niche.
AI provides information such as demographics, engagement rates, and authenticity scores to help marketing teams make sound business decisions. - Advertising or Media Buying – It’s no secret that Google Ads extensively uses AI to automate bidding strategies, test various combinations for responsive search ads, forecast future ad performance and trends, and detect and prevent fraudulent clicks and impressions.
On the other hand, some newcomers pique the interest of savvy marketers. Albert AI manages and optimizes campaigns across multiple channels to cater to more dynamic teams, while Pattern89 analyzes millions of data points from digital ads to predict and improve ad performance.
Some Factors That Could Hamper Growth
The benefits of AI-powered social media marketing are incredibly real and already felt by businesses worldwide. Yet, marketing executives must remember that AI is a complex technology requiring businesses to beef up specific skill sets in:
- Machine learning and deep learning
- Cognitive computing
- Image recognition
In addition to the skills gap, data and privacy concerns may arise due to the heavy reliance on user data. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) impose strict limits on data usage. AI technologies also undergo rapid advancements, which can be difficult to keep up with, especially for smaller marketing teams.
The Way Forward
These challenges are a call for CMOs to step up. They should take this opportunity to assess their teams’ AI maturity, identify areas for improvement, and outline avenues for sustainable growth and innovation.
Social media issues must also be addressed within the context of broader marketing efforts and AI adoption, alongside their immediate impact on both. This enables marketing leaders to prioritize solutions, such as providing training and upskilling opportunities for their teams. It’s also crucial to manage expectations and build trust with stakeholders to get the support needed for scaling social media marketing with AI.
