How Businesses Can Leverage AI to Streamline Their Social Media

Hey Unicorns, Happy Tuesday!

If you’ve been following along since day one, you know that we’ve been going over my 10 social media predictions for 2024 and breaking down each one. This week, in the sixth edition of the Unicorn Social Newsletter, we’ll discuss how businesses can use artificial intelligence for their social media.

As many of you may know, OpenAI recently announced the launch of Sora, it’s brand-new text-to-video program. Sora is immensely powerful, and many fear it may lead to massive job losses throughout Hollywood. Programs like Sora are changing how we create social media content, and new AI tools are constantly coming out. I recently wrote a LinkedIn article on Sora and its impact on content creators, which you can check out here!

AI is moving quickly, and the best we can do as business owners is adapt and embrace the change in ways that can help us amplify our business. In today’s edition we’ll cover:

• The current state of AI in social media
• How businesses can use AI tools in social media
• How AI tools can support business growth
• Cautions about using AI for social media

AI and Social Media

Artificial Intelligence has seamlessly woven itself into the fabric of our social media landscape. From automatic content moderation to personalized recommendations, AI is reshaping how businesses run their social media.

As of January 2024, there are 5.04 billion active social media users worldwide, growing by an average of 8.4 users per second! On average, these users spend 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on social media. With all this growth, social media has become a cornerstone in the marketing efforts of businesses. This, in turn, has led to increased demand for AI tools to help business owners streamline their social media efforts.

Leveraging AI Tools in Social Media

There are many artificial intelligence tools already available to businesses. With such high demand, new tools launch almost daily. This means that businesses have many opportunities to use AI tools to make their social media efforts more streamlined. Let's discuss a few ways in which you can leverage AI tools for your social media:

1: Copywriting: in 2023, 28% of marketers stated that they used artificial intelligence to help them write marketing copy. Having AI help you generate your social media copy can save you valuable time. Here are a few ways AI can help you with text and visual content generation:?

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT understands natural language and crafts human-like responses in conversations. You can leverage ChatGPT to help you write Instagram captions, Pinterest pins, and much more. You can also leverage ChatGPT to help you optimize your content or re-write it.?

Microsoft Co-Pilot is another excellent tool for copywriting. Simply ask it to help you write compelling ad copy. Be sure to describe your target audience your product/service, and then sit back and watch it work its magic. (In fact, I actually prefer Co-Pilot over ChatGPT at the moment!)

2: Automated Scheduling and Captivating Captions:

• Later is a scheduling software we use right here at Agency 8. Their AI analyzes optimal posting times, ensuring content reaches your audience when they’re most active. Later works with most social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more!
• Later also has an AI caption feature included with a premium account that will help you generate social media captions.
• As mentioned above, Co-Pilot or ChatGPT are great tools to help you generate captions for your social media posts. Just be sure to be detailed with your prompts to get the best results.?

Visual Magic: AI-enhanced image recognition and editing tools transform mundane photos into eye-catching content.

• Apps like FaceTune can “AI Enhance” your photo or video to do things like smooth your skin or whiten your teeth.
• Models like DALL-E and Midjourney can create images from text descriptions or generate variations of existing visuals.
• I would use AI image generation sparingly as a business owner and as someone who creates content for businesses. You want most of the visual content you produce to demonstrate your product/service as accurately as possible. Additionally, there are many talented content creators out there that you can hire to produce quality content for your business.

Business Strategies: Leveraging AI for Growth

As we’ve discussed, AI is a powerful and helpful business tool. It can help reduce the amount of time it takes to perform tasks such as copywriting, coming up with captions, or creating beautiful visuals. Next, let's discuss a few ways in which AI can be leveraged to benefit your business’s growth.?

1. Identify Emerging Trends and Behaviors: AI-powered data analytics can reveal customer patterns in your business’s market. By leveraging AI, you can explore new growth opportunities as they emerge. This allows you to be proactive and get ahead of your competitors.?
2. Analyze Large Amounts of Data: AI can capture market trends, customer preferences, and competitive landscapes at a rate that humans are incapable of. Machine learning algorithms are also capable of predicting customer behavior, thus allowing businesses to adapt quickly.?
3. Automate Routine Tasks and Content Creation: Automation of routine tasks is likely one of the areas in which AI can be most supportive for business owners. As a small business owner, you can easily experience overwhelm, burnout, or growing pains. AI allows you to focus on more high-level tasks by taking care of automation for marketing and sales tasks.?

Cautions When Using AI in Social Media

Artificial intelligence is not without its challenges for business owners. While it can be greatly helpful, it’s essential to understand the pitfalls of leveraging AI for your business. Here are some cautions to keep in mind:

1. Avoid Over-Reliance on AI: as discussed in last week's edition, authenticity is key on social media. Your customers demand realness, whether you’re operating online as a business or a personal brand. Using AI for every message you post online can become dry and repetitive and lack the human touch. When I create content with the help of AI, I use it as a starting point. I then build it up with my own original thoughts, ideas, and stories. If you become over-reliant on AI to create your content for you trust me, your audience can tell.?
2. Verify Content Credibility: AI-generated content often lacks sources or credibility. Fact-checking the information you’re putting online or adding your own sources is essential. One of the reasons I currently favor Co-Pilot over ChatGPT is that it adds citations to every response by default. This then gives me more places to explore when researching articles or other content.?
3. Refine AI-Generated Content: AI-generated content has a specific tone to it that allows us eagle-eyed marketers and AI-professionals to know precisely when someone’s using it. Don’t just copy and paste an AI-generated text into your social media posting section and blast it out into space. It’s essential to add your brand voice and ensure that your customers feel the message is coming from you rather than an AI. Your content should always reflect your message and resonate with your audience, regardless of whether or not it was written with AI.
4. Be Mindful of Plagiarism: artificial intelligence has to pull from somewhere; it doesn’t always generate its own original thoughts. Always be mindful of the fact that the AI could have plagiarized content from another source. A solution to this challenge is to run your content through a plagiarism detector and Grammarly to ensure the best results.?

Conclusion:

As AI continues to shape our social media landscape, business owners can embrace its capabilities while preserving our unique human touch. AI allows us to streamline and automate our existing processes to become more productive people. When you stray too far from having that personal touch, your content can lack brand voice and fail to resonate with your audience.?

Remember that authenticity is key for business success on social media in 2024. AI tools are exciting, but they shouldn’t be a crutch. Artificial intelligence can be a helpful tool to make our lives easier, but there still needs to be a human on the other side handling that tool. Don’t let yourself fall prey to the lure of constant AI-generated content. Originality is good, too. As AI becomes more integrated into our daily social media practices, never forget to mix innovation with your imagination.?

With that, Unicorns, I hope you have a wonderful week and happy posting!?

- Avery Sly