The impact of social media on our daily lives is undeniable. Each year, the number of social media platforms and the global number of active users is currently estimated at approx 4.9 billion people. That figure represents nearly 60% of the world's population, meaning companies can attract a large number of prospects and customers by marketing on popular platforms. Social media marketing automation is crucial for streamlining and optimizing marketing campaigns on these channels for reliable results. The efficiency of social media automation is improving even as artificial intelligence (AI) integrated with these tools, and it's certainly a step worth making for forward-thinking marketing teams.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AUTOMATION: OVERVIEW AND IMPORTANCE
Social media marketing automation is the process of automating the numerous marketing activities performed on social media through powerful tools and software solutions. Social media is a potential gold mine for businesses, but the sheer number of platforms poses the challenge of maintaining a strong and consistent online presence. Businesses need to regularly upload posts, monitor evolving trends, communicate with customers, and measure performance metrics over time. All of these activities must be done simultaneously or concurrently on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Normally, these tasks would be overwhelming for most marketing teams, but automation tools allow brands to run social media campaigns smoothly.
In recent years there have been shifts in consumer behavior that make them more responsive to social media marketing. For example, 90% of users follow at least one brand on social media. Also, 76% of the active users made a purchase after social media ads. Therefore, brands should work on perfecting their social media marketing campaigns by incorporating automation tools. Here are some reasons why it's important to do this:
SAVES TIME AND DIFFICULTY
The work involved in maintaining multiple brand accounts is daunting to say the least. Social media marketing automation tools simplify tasks for marketers by streamlining workflows and putting repetitive basic tasks on autopilot. As a result, marketing teams can get the same amount of work done in less time, more efficiently and with less manpower.
GUARANTEES BRAND CONSISTENCY
One of the most important rules of marketing is to maintain a consistent brand tone and voice across all channels. Social media marketing automation tools allow your business to stay consistent with publishing content across all platforms. By doing this, brands can build lasting relationships with their target audience and convey the best possible brand image.
IMPROVES PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT
The average person spends about 145 minutes on social media every day. The opportunities for brands to connect with individuals are plentiful, which is why social media marketing automation is important. It ensures that questions and comments from customers are answered quickly and adequately, which leads to higher customer satisfaction.
RICH INSIGHTS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING
Social media channels are excellent sources of valuable data that businesses can leverage. But by subjecting this data to deep analysis, brands can uncover rich insights into their customers' preferences and needs. These insights can be used to develop new content strategies and more personalized marketing.
HOW CAN AI CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUCCESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AUTOMATION?
Automation tools have progressed significantly in recent years and are capable of impressive feats. However, there is always a place for the inclusion of AI, as the technology can improve the speed and performance of any software or tool once integrated. Social media marketing automation can reach new heights with AI integration. Here are five ways this is possible:
INTELLIGENT CONTENT CREATION AT SCALE
Crafting compelling and engaging posts is obviously important for growing your social media accounts. AI can deliver high quality content, from relevant headlines and captions to full posts. What's more, it can do this in seconds, meaning AI can produce content at scale, requiring only some human editing to perfect the content before publishing. This is made possible by Natural Language Generation (NLG), an AI technique that generates human-like texts using language rules and statistical models. Therefore, AI can help marketers save time and effort without sacrificing content quality.
AI can contribute to the process of creating relevant content in other ways. For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can analyze text data, especially customer data, from social media and other sources. The insights from this analysis contain vital information, such as emerging trends and hot topics, and marketers can use such insights to adjust content strategy. Sentiment analysis can also process messages to gain insight into the feelings expressed in them. Then social media content can be adjusted to ensure posts resonate emotionally with the target audience.
ADVANCED AUDIENCE DIRECTION
Social media platforms consist of a large pool of potential customers, but not every active user is perfect for your products and services. For context, Facebook alone has about 2.99 billion users. So rather than trying to advertise to everyone, audience targeting is crucial to maximizing social media marketing automation efforts. AI algorithms can help companies improve their social media targeting for more effective marketing and advertising campaigns.
AI-powered lookalike audience modeling comes in handy here because it uses the key attributes of your best customers to find new users with matching attributes so that advertising efforts can be targeted to them. AI can also boost social listening tools for better understanding of your audience and more accurate targeting. By applying natural language processing, real-time behavioral analysis, and machine learning techniques to social media posts and comments, your company improves its customer knowledge and uses the information to target similar prospects and expand its customer base.
IMPROVED ONLINE ENGAGEMENT
Social media marketing automation requires businesses to respond quickly and appropriately to customers at all times. This can be a challenge when you consider the number of comments and posts. Businesses operating in different geographic locations can also face the challenge of time differences. However, with AI-powered tools that scan your social media accounts for comments and direct messages, your brand can get one step closer to perfecting online engagement.
Again, natural language processing is key to this feature of social media marketing automation. Thanks to its ability to understand human language, this AI algorithm can scan feeds, comments and messages for the sentiment and intent behind them. NLP, along with other techniques, is useful in identifying potential problems, such as spikes in negative reviews or customer complaints, so that action can be taken quickly to improve brand image. Of course, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can be integrated into social media pages to automate online interactions with users.
STRONGER SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS
With AI algorithms powering your social media advertising campaigns, your brand is sure to have a stronger performance. Machine learning can learn from previous campaigns to identify the elements responsible for previous successes and failures. This helps companies customize ad elements such as headlines, images, and CTAs for better results. AI-powered customer segmentation can also help brands narrow their audience for more personalized and cost-effective advertising. Predictive analytics also allows marketers to predict future trends that could impact performance, such as emerging shifts in customer behavior and new content style preferences.
IMPROVED DATA ANALYSIS
AI can vastly improve social media marketing automation by processing data to produce insights for data-driven decision-making. For example, AI can analyze campaign performance data such as impressions, conversion rates, click-through rates, and cost per acquisition. This helps companies make informed decisions to improve their ad campaigns on subsequent attempts. Likewise, AI can monitor engagement metrics such as comments, likes, and shares to help marketers optimize their content styles and post schemes for more engagement. The analytical power of AI can also be applied to the identification of influencers that brands can collaborate with to improve their online presence by leveraging AI's ability to sift through vast amounts of data and uncover the most meaningful insights that will drive your business forward. can help.
In conclusion, social media marketing automation has streamlined the process of managing multiple social media accounts for businesses and brands. This has resulted in companies saving time, ensuring efficiency and maintaining consistent brand images. AI can further improve social media automation by improving content creation, targeted ad campaigns and data analytics. That's why it's time for companies to integrate AI into their automation to fully unlock the immense potential of social media for commercial activities.
