How to Use AI for Social Media: Use Cases & Strategy

AI-Powered Content Generation

Say goodbye to writer’s block! The advent of generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot) has simplified content creation. Accordingly, these tools can help you craft captivating content, from catchy captions to stunning visuals.

Further, it can suggest ideas and formats that align with your audience when you’re stuck for ideas.

AI gives your audience more exciting social experiences. They include real-time language transition for smooth communication across borders, personalized filters to foster your social interactions, and more.

AI for Effective Advertising

AI is widely adopted in different aspects of advertising.

First, it can analyze massive amounts of user data to highly target advertising campaigns to the most relevant users for your offerings.

Second, AI boosts the creation of ad content. However, one 2024 survey by Yahoo! states that most customers are likely to trust ads and companies posting these ads if they disclaim that AI gets involved in ad creation.

Ever wonder why Facebook or TikTok can suggest content right after you think about them? This is the power of sentiment analysis and social media algorithms. AI will not only understand what people like but also their emotions and motivations. This will unlock hyper-personalized content experiences, tailored specifically for each user.

However, it argues that this mind-reading capability can negatively impact mental health, therefore calling for increased transparency from using AI algorithms to “read” people’s minds.

Further, in the European Union, social media platforms like TikTok have to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA) and give users more control over the content they see. Accordingly, they can turn off social media algorithms and watch chronological feeds instead of personalized ones.

As a smart assistant, AI proves helpful in numerous cases. Accordingly, it can boost your team productivity and transform the way you interact with your target audience if applied correctly. Here are the top 10 popular use cases of AI in social media:

Content Generation

Creating engaging social media content across platforms can be a constant struggle. That’s where AI comes in to help you generate thumb-stopping content. Here’s what AI can do:

Beat Writer’s Block with AI Ideas & Drafts: Stuck staring at a blank page? Fear not! AI-powered tools can help by analyzing your audience demographics and past performance to suggest trending topics and content formats. They even create initial drafts to kick-start your creative journey.

Create Engaging Headlines & Captions: Worry about creating compelling headlines and captions to grab your audience’s attention? AI can analyze high-performing posts. It then recommends headlines and captions that are concise and engaging to spark conversations.

Personalize Content: AI can analyze your audience data to understand their preferences and tailor your content accordingly. Accordingly, you can automatically generate personalized product recommendations or birthday shoutouts.

Example: Designveloper

So how is AI often used for content generation in social media? Let’s take a real-world example of how Designveloper works. Here, we leverage AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, BuzzSumo, and Grammarly to streamline the process of generating social media content across different channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. In the near future, we plan to reach our target audience on YouTube and Medium.

So how do these AI-powered tools support our content creation? BuzzSumo can analyze and identify trending topics on social media platforms, then enabling us to create engaging and suitable content. Meanwhile, Grammarly helps us check our content’s grammar and improve its quality.

We use AI writing assistants like GPT-4o to create initial post ideas and generate high-quality social media posts with high accuracy and speed. This frees up our teams’s time to focus on strategic activities, like crafting engaging visuals and adding a human touch to the generated text.

Further, we understand the importance of hashtags in helping others discover our content and connecting with like-minded people. Therefore, we often find relevant hashtags for our social media posts using such tools as Mentionlytics, Facebook Business Suite, or Hastagify.me.

Sentiment Analysis

Do you want to know how people truly feel about your brand on social media? If yes, AI-powered sentiment analysis is here to help!

Sentiment analysis leverages AI to analyze emotions behind social media posts and comments. Here’s how this translates to real-world benefits:

Identify Customer Satisfaction: By sifting through vast text data, AI algorithms help you identify positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. This enables you to understand better how your audience perceives your brand, offerings, or campaigns. You then can quickly identify areas for improvement based on real-time customer feedback.

Respond to Crisis Situations: Social media can be a breeding ground for negativity during a brand crisis. Sentiment analysis can help you track the situation in real time by determining the root cause of the negativity and enabling you to respond proactively with a proper solution.

Fine-Tune Your Social Media Strategy: When you comprehend the overall sentiment towards your brand, you can refine your social media strategy for better outcomes. For example, if you see a lot of positive feedback on your funny posts, you might want to create more lighthearted content.

Example: Nike

So, how do companies adopt AI-powered sentiment analysis in real life? Let’s look at the case study of Nike:

As we all know, Nike is a famous sportswear retailer headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. Back in 2018, Nike leveraged social media sentiment analysis to gauge public reaction to their sponsorship of Colin Kaepernick’s #justdoit campaign.

Particularly, Kaepernick (a former football quarterback and now a civil rights activist) kneeled during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality. This ignited controversy. However, Nike risked their reputation by sponsoring him. They then utilized sentiment analysis tools to track public opinion on social media (e.g., news articles or tweets) before and after the campaign launch.

Initially, negativity with #boytcottNike hashtags appeared. Yet over time, overall sentiment shifted positive, and purchase intent for Nike products actually rose.

From Nike’s story, you can leverage AI-powered sentiment analysis tools (e.g., Sentieo, Brandwatch, or Synthesio) to track social media mentions during campaigns. This allows you to monitor public opinion, identify positive or negative attitudes towards your brand, and gain valuable insights.

Predictive Analytics

Wouldn’t it be amazing to predict which social media posts will go viral and which ones will fall flat? AI-powered tools (e.g., Socialbakers or Sprout Social) integrate predictive analytics features to make this dream come true.

Predictive analytics uses AI to analyze historical data and discover patterns. In social media, this data could involve anything from the audience’s attitudes and past post performance to competitor engagement. By analyzing this data, AI can predict how your future social media content will perform.

This will help you:

Identify the best times to post your content for maximum reach and impact.
Predict what topics are about to gain traction and create trending content.
Determine what kind of content your audience is most likely to engage with and personalize your message to each customer segment.

Example: PepsiCo

PepsiCo developed pepviz, a proprietary tool leveraging data, advanced analytics, and Foods & Beverage (F&B) industry expertise to anticipate what will be popular in the future.

This software keeps track of what customers are currently buying. It then uses this information to forecast what they will want to buy in the future. This helps PepsiCo know exactly which products to stock on store shelves.

The adoption of pepviz has forged a more collaborative relationship between PepsiCo and its store partners. By combining the tool’s predictions with the experience of store salespeople, they can come up with even more creative ways to sell products.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

The AI-powered chatbot market is projected to increase at a CAGR of 24.32% from 2024 to 2029. This impressive growth is fueled by higher demand for a tireless and helpful assistant available 24/7 to answer customer questions and handle common issues on social media.

These chatbots can mimic human-like conversations with users on social media platforms like Facebook Messenger or Twitter Direct Messages. They can answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), offer product information, and even troubleshoot basic problems without human intervention.

Some virtual assistants (e.g., Marriott or American Airlines) can resolve more complex tasks, like scheduling appointments, processing orders, or providing customized recommendations). For this reason, they give you more time to focus on more complex issues, thereby enhancing overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Today, there are various AI platforms to build and implement virtual assistants for your social media channels. These tools include ManyChat, Botspace, and LivePerson.

Example: Sephora’s Beauty Assistant on Facebook Messenger

Sephora is one of the most popular beauty brands in the world. The company uses a Facebook Messenger virtual assistant to improve the customer experience. Accordingly, this AI-powered chatbot allows you to:

Ask questions about specific beauty products.
Get customized recommendations based on your preferences.
Instantly book an in-store makeover.
Connect with a live agent.
Share store feedback.

Influencer Marketing

Gone are the days of blindly searching for influencers and struggling with managing them all. AI helps your company seek the ideal partners to reach your target audience with ease. Here’s how this advanced tech has revolutionized influencer marketing:

Target the Right Audience: AI can analyze social media data (e.g., demographics or interests) of an influencer’s audience. This then helps you identify influencers whose followers perfectly fit your target market, ensuring your messages reach the right people.

Spot Fake Followers: AI can analyze follower activity and engagement metrics to detect influencers with genuine audiences. This helps your company avoid wasting resources on those who might not deliver real results.

Optimize Campaign Performance: AI can track the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns in real time. This allows you to identify what’s working and adjust your strategy on the fly for maximum impact.

There are several AI-powered platforms for influencer marketing you should consider. They include Brandwatch, Brand24, HypeAuditor, and more.

Example: L’Oreal

L’Oreal is a global beauty brand. In partnerships with Influential (an AI-powered influencer marketing platform), L’Oreal successfully identifies beauty influencers for their campaigns.

Particularly, the platform uses IBM Watson’s AI capabilities to analyze factors like psychographic data, demographics, and engagement rates. This helps match L’Oreal with those perfectly aligning with their brand image and target audience.

This data-driven approach ensures that L’Oreal partners with influencers who can deliver impactful and authentic content.

Ad Targeting & Personalization

When most people go online for entertainment and work, many companies also digitize their business activities to reach their target audience. But the question here is: How can your company’s ads and offerings reach the right people?

Traditionally, targeting social media ads depended on demographics and preferences. But today, AI facilitates this task by analyzing vast amounts of user data (e.g., likes or comments) to explore which kind of content or offerings a user is likely to be interested in. Then, you can craft highly customized ads and send them to the right customer groups.

This can significantly increase the ad’s relevance and click-through rates.

Today, you can leverage different AI platforms to personalize your social media ads. These platforms include Facebook Ads Manager with AI capabilities (e.g., AI Sandbox or Advantage), Marin, or Albert.

These tools also analyze campaign performance data and automatically adjust targeting parameters to reach the most engaged and relevant audience for your budget.

Example: Clinique UK

Previously, Clinique UK often built social media ad campaigns manually, from selecting ad formats and placements to designing creatives. But when they want to enhance the performance of their Moisture Surge product launch campaign, they go to Facebook for help.

Clinique UK then tests Meta’s Advantage+ alongside their usual manual setup. They also use AI/ML functionalities AI/ML to automate and facilitate ad creation and management. With these capabilities, they can establish a single campaign while testing up to 150 distinct combinations of creatives, targeting, budgets, and placements.

With the support of AI algorithms, Clinique UK can automate ads delivery to Meta’s different placements (e.g., Facebook or Instagram) based on what’s likely to bring the best outcomes at the lowest cost.

Content Moderation

Have you ever wondered why some of your content is removed right after posted? That’s the power of AI-powered content moderation.

Today, social media platforms are bustling even with content. However, ensuring a safe and positive space for everyone is daunting, as the content and comments posted can be fake or offensive. That’s why AI-powered content moderation steps in, acting as your digital guardian.

So how can AI handle the content moderation job? Let’s take a look:

Identify Harmful Content: AI can analyze texts, images, and videos to identify potential violations of community guidelines. These include hate speech, bullying, violent threats, or any other content that can harm or offend users.

Flag Content for Review: AI can automatically flag potentially harmful content for human moderators to review. This helps the moderators to focus on more complex cases requiring a more nuanced understanding.

Automate Content Removal: AI can automatically get rid of harmful content that has clear-cut violations. This allows for a rapid response to keeping social media environments safe.

Normally, social media platforms integrate AI algorithms to filter out harassment content. But there are numerous AI-powered tools out there to help you scrutinize all content before posting (e.g., images or videos) like Smart Moderation or ModerateContent.

Example: YouTube

We all know YouTube is a massive video-sharing platform in the world. But it always faces harmful and unscrutinized content. This social media platform uses AI algorithms to detect and flag videos that break its community guidelines.

Accordingly, AI will analyze such factors as visual content, audio transcripts, and user behavior to explore potential issues. Human moderators then review these flagged videos and make the final decision on whether to remove them. This combination of AI and human oversight helps YouTube maintain a safe space for its vast user base.

Recommendation Systems

This can be a familiar scenario for most of us: scrolling through our social media feed and seeing content we actually want to see! That’s what AI-powered recommendation systems are doing on social media platforms.

These systems leverage AI to analyze user data and suggest personalized content, ads, offerings, or people to follow. By understanding user interests and behavior patterns, AI can recommend things that are likely to resonate with each individual.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok already integrate AI-powered recommendation systems to help you target the right ads, content, and offerings to the right audience. In case you want to build your own system, you can leverage such platforms and services as H2O.ai, Amazon Personalize, and Recombee.

Example: TikTok

So, how do AI-powered recommendation systems work on social networking sites? Let’s take a look at the case study of TikTok. Whenever opening the TikTok app, the “For You” Page is always the first thing you see. This feed, powered by AI, curates a unique selection of videos for each user based on their watch history, likes, and engagement patterns.

The high personalization ensures users can explore new content creators and trends they’ll genuinely enjoy. It then keeps them scrolling and coming back for more.

Social media is a treasure trove of data, but sifting through endless conversations and posts can be overwhelming. That’s where AI-powered social media intelligence steps in, acting as your personal social listening assistant.

Accordingly, social media intelligence tools like Brand24, Brandwatch, or Sprinklr leverage AI to analyze massive amounts of social media data. They then offer valuable insights into brand awareness, industry trends, and competitor strategies. This enables you to inform decision-making and devise winning social media strategies.

Here’s what AI empowers social media intelligence:

Brand Monitoring & Reputation Management: AI can track mentions of your brand, offerings, and campaigns across channels. It then discovers positive and negative sentiments, enabling you to respond to praise and handle criticism promptly. This proactive approach helps you keep your brand reputation positive.

Competitive Analysis: AI can help you explore what your competitors are doing on social media. To do so, AI analyzes their content strategy, influencer partnerships, audience engagement, and more. This allows you to benchmark your performance and find areas for improvement.

Trend Identification: AI helps you discover emerging trends through conversations about your industry on social media.

Example: Quantum

Quantum is a global provider of IT services. It leveraged Brandwatch (a social listening platform) to acquire meaningful insights from social media data. This data helped them understand:

How people perceive Quantum and its competitors on social media.
What topics and conversations are trending within the IT service industry.
What strategies Quantum’s competitors are using on social media.

By leveraging AI-powered social media intelligence, Quantum was able to inform its social media strategy, enhance product development, and gain a competitive edge.

Fraud Detection

On social media platforms, users may confront fraudulent activities, from fake accounts spreading misinformation to impersonators targeting your customers. This is where AI-powered fraud detection comes in as your digital security guard. It protects your brand and audience from these malicious activities.

There are various AI-powered platforms that enable fraud detection on social media. They include Sift Science, IBM X-Force, and more. So how can these tools address social media fraud? Let’s take a look:

Identify Fake Accounts: These tools can detect fake accounts by analyzing account creation data, user behavior patterns, and even language use. This can involve spotting automated bots and accounts engaging in suspicious activities.

Combat Spam and Phishing Attacks: By analyzing content and user interactions, AI can discover spam messages and phishing attempts. They often include impersonating legitimate accounts or using deceptive tactics to steal personal information. AI then gets rid of these threats before they reach your audience.

Protect Brand Reputation: Fraudulent activities can ruin your brand reputation. That’s why AI comes in to control mentions of your brand in association with scams or impersonation attempts. This enables you to swiftly resolve the issue and safeguard your brand image.

Example: Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social media platform with over 3 billion users as of April 2024. Like other social networking sites, Facebook is also flooded with fake accounts and zombie content. Accordingly, Facebook distinguishes two types of fake accounts:

User-Misclassified Accounts: These are actually personal profiles yet intended for business purposes. They’re marked as not ideal for these purposes as Facebook offers dedicated “Pages” specifically designed for businesses.

Violating Accounts: These involve scamming, spamming, or other violations.

To block these fake accounts, Facebook will leverage a machine learning system (Deep Entity Classification) and hand-coded rules to identify which is fake. It then stops these fake accounts to prevent any harm to real users.

5 Steps to Build an Effective Social Media Strategy for Using AI

Although AI brings us immense benefits, using it in the wrong way can ruin your social media marketing efforts. At Designveloper, we understand the importance of a strong social media presence. So we craft impactful social media strategies to use AI more effectively. Here’s our roadmap you may use as a reference:

Set Clear Goals

First, you need to define what you want to achieve with social media. Here are several common goals:

Enhance brand perception and reach
Generate leads and conversions
Build brand credibility and thought leadership
Boost customer engagement

Regardless of your ultimate purpose, setting up clear objectives is a must-have step. You may leverage AI to better understand your target audience, from demographics to interests and browsing habits. Further, you can research industry benchmarks to know which metrics your competitors are using to measure their social media success. All these things help you set realistic and measurable goals.

Choose the Right AI Tools for Your Needs

There are a multitude of AI-powered tools for social media. However, the wrong choice can damage your marketing efforts and campaigns. Therefore, ask these questions to pick the perfect fit for your business:

What are my biggest social media challenges? (e.g., content creation, audience insights, or scheduling)
What’s my budget for AI tools?
Is the tool’s interface intuitive and user-friendly?
Can the tool integrate with my existing platforms? (e.g., CRM or data analytics)
Does the tool possibly scale up as my social media needs grow?
Can the tool provide reliable customer support in case I encounter any issues?
How do other clients evaluate the tool? And what achievements do they get when using the platform?

AI is a powerful assistant for social media marketing, but it’s not a magic bullet. Simply having AI tools won’t guarantee success. AI works on high-quality training data and our input prompts.

So it’s crucial to establish clear social media guidelines to ensure consistency with your brand identity across all channels and posts. Further, they also provide AI tools with the specific direction they need to generate outcomes that align with your goals.

For example, Designveloper now leverages different key social media channels. Each platform caters to a specific audience and has unique strengths.

Particularly, Facebook allows for the most creative freedom when it comes to content. So, we often use language that is engaging and conversational while still conveying the key messages of the company. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is a professional social media platform. So, we focus on informative and professional content like industry news or thought leadership.

Besides, we specify the formats and quality of our content (e.g., text or videos), from length and tone to hashtags and emojis.

Further, we strategically schedule content for optimal reach by considering posting time and frequency. We also leverage such tools as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Social Champ to streamline this scheduling process.

By following these guidelines, our social media content consistently aligns with our brand and messaging and is of the highest standard. For this reason, we can enhance our online reach and impact, and connect with our target audience in a meaningful way.

Consider the Ethical Use of AI Tools

Next, you should leverage the best practices of using AI tools ethically and responsibly on social media. This helps you maintain trust and transparency, avoid social harm, protect user privacy, and ensure your brand reputation.

Accordingly, you should be honest about using AI-generated content. Further, AI tools may present inaccurate information, so double-checking their results before publishing is a must to ensure accuracy and factuality. This builds trust with your audience and positions your brand as a trustworthy source of information.

In addition, we advise you against using your company or audience’s credentials and sensitive information in prompts sent to AI tools. While AI can be a powerful tool, sending them sensitive data can pose security risks. If this data is leaked or intercepted, it can exert serious consequences for your audience and even ruin your brand reputation.

Therefore, combining AI tools with human oversight helps you achieve the best results while mitigating potential risks associated with AI.

Measure Success and Adjust Strategies

Finally, you should implement platform analytics to gain valuable insights into your social media performance. At Designveloper, we leverage such tools as Facebook Insights and LinkedIn Analytics to collect data and create detailed reports. These data analytics tools allow us to better understand our campaign and post’s performance on each social media platform through key metrics like clicks, views, engagement, and conversions.

Further, we advise you to consider your audience’s feedback through comments, messages, and surveys to comprehend what resonates with your audience. Then, you can replicate successful strategies or promptly adjust social media strategies for better results.

Conclusion

Now you’re here! After this article, you’ve better understood how to use AI in social media more responsibly. From creating engaging content and scheduling posts perfectly to targeting ads and detecting fraudulent activities, AI can cover them all. However, using AI effectively in social media requires a thorough strategy, from setting a clear goal to measuring and adjusting your strategy. Curious about other topics of AI in marketing? Subscribe to our blog for more mind-blowing content!