Social media in today’s day and time is used by a majority of users on a daily basis, be it for posting updates about personal lives to checking out brands and posts from others. According to a study by we are social, the number of users as of January 2019 is 3.48 billion. Moreover, on average, the report states that there is a 10% year-on-year rise in the active percentage of people on social media and the number will keep on increasing.
With so many users investing their time online, it is only natural that companies start focusing their marketing strategies on social media. However, with the growing needs of the consumer and infinite possibilities, targeting the right customer, as well as, the market is tough especially when you even need to keep a track of them. It is at this time Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes to the rescue. But the question is how?
In this article, we’ll learn what is Social Media Marketing and understand in depth how AI impacts Social Media Marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of internet marketing that makes use of various social media platforms to promote a business and its products, thereby driving traffic to the business website. Some of the popular social media platforms that marketers use are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.
SMM is a simple and powerful way for marketers to reach out to their potential customers irrespective of the size of the business. As a business, some of the key things you would do as a part of your SMM campaign is to post images, videos and text updates for audience engagement. The more powerful the strategy, the more productive will be the outcome.
One of the ways SMM helps your business is helping you create brand awareness. Take, for instance, you have a Facebook page for your business on this page there are roughly about say, 5 thousand followers. Out of these many followers if 1% likes/comments or shares your post which talks about your brand and has the website link, it increases the reach of your business, eventually leading to an increase in your website traffic. Furthermore, this enables you to establish your brand’s identity as it builds credibility thus, raising conversions.
Apart from this, SMM also helps you interact with your customers better, understanding their needs and catering to them individually. This can be done by you replying to the customer’s comments or queries addressed by them either in the form of public posts/comments on posts or Private/Direct messages on your social media account.
However, as we just noticed above the average number of people active on social media is in billions, and to cater to such a large audience would require an in-depth analysis and ideas which can be a mammoth task to a human mind. It is at this time that Artificial Intelligence comes to the rescue.
Artificial Intelligence backed by the power of machine learning is slowly but surely changing the way businesses interact with consumers. Let us see how AI impacts SMM activities of a growing online business.
3 ways AI impact Social Media M for a growing business
AI-powered bots and algorithms are replacing human analysing power and help in analyzing real-time trends and user engagement activities. Here are 4 ways in which these bots help.
- Predicts the outgrowth
Predictive analysis is one of the core competencies of an AI-powered bot. With the help of predictive analysis, AI-powered bots are able to extract information from existing data sets in order to predict future outcomes. When it comes to Social Media Marketing, AI enables businesses to predict the growth or engagement activities in response to the customer. For example, if a customer likes a set of posts or always asks questions on other types of posts, as a marketer you learn to predict the next action and accordingly, design and release data that would predict the maximum outgrowth. - Backtracks marketers
AI algorithms at times backtrack. This helps marketers revisit points that are old. This way you as a marketer can steer clear of the things that hampered your progress and not repeat them again. For instance, businesses make decisions based on the past activities of users or their habits, be it search queries or the type of purchase made. Having this data helps marketers know their customers and serve them better by showing them the right kind of products. If marketers were to rely on manually understanding this data set, it would take weeks, eventually hampering productivity. Machine learning algorithms help marketers backtrack the data set and process a huge amount of information in fairly less time. Once you have this information, you can then effectively target your customers on social media with the right post or personalized messages that would entice them to click the link taking them to the website. And who knows, they might even make the purchase. Meltwater is one of the tools that you as a marketer can use to analyze your brand or optimise your social media marketing activities. - Analyse the right time to target the audience
The success of a campaign largely depends on the amount of user interaction. Hence, timing is of utmost importance. If you were to schedule a post or post a story on your social media account at a time when users are most inactive, it defeats not only the purpose of the post but also, doesn’t help build your brand.However, this gives rise to an important question – if you post at the same predicted ‘peak time’ wouldn’t other brands too? If yes, then you would be overcrowding the target user’s timeline. The solution to this query is, either you don’t think much and continue posting at the generic predicted time-slots or evaluate a bit more and post content at different time slots. Once you’re done with this, analyze each individual engagement and impressions on your posts. This way you come to know the preference of your target audience and cater to them better.Running an e-commerce store requires persistent effort right from what the user likes to what time he/she surfs the internet. However, catering to all the customers is impossible but it is possible to cater to most of them. AI-based tools help you analyze the location and the time zones of your customers and when they are the most active. When you run your campaigns at this time you will notice a significant change in user engagement. Also, using AI-powered tools to schedule your campaigns not only enables you to post them at the right time but also, reduces your efforts as a marketer to maintain a sheet with the when to post what tracker.
Conclusion:
In summary, social media channels are the best when it comes to leveraging and targeting a large amount of audience. Using the right AI-based tools can help you enhance your social media marketing by analyzing your customer interests, as well as, enable you to focus more on strategies for effective marketing rather than managing the activities themselves.
Do you use any AI-based tool for your SMM activities or suggestions on the article? If yes, please do let us know in the comments below how has it helped you.
