Today, there are more than 3 billion people logging onto social media accounts globally. This means approximately half of the world’s population spends a significant part on their phone sharing a photo from their recent vacation or updating a status. As the use of social media has increased exponentially, it has become an important segment for marketers too. The massive number implies that more than 40% of the world’s population is within reach of anyone who is trying to advertise, sell, or even promote a product/service via the internet.
How Is Search And Social Media Marketing Related?
Why would marketers care if almost 40% of individuals globally are using social media? According to a report by HubSpot, social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. And, today 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some of the other forms. MarketingSherpa reports that adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand via social networking. This makes it clear why search and social media are closely related.
How has social media impacted marketing?
With such a close relationship between social media and marketing, marketers are coming up with creative ways that can help inspire, enrage, amuse, promote and sell products, services, or even ideas. One of the creative examples of a social media campaign is the one carried out by Visit Norway, who took a slightly alternative approach to promote tourism. The campaign was called #SheepWithAView, where the photographer spent 20 days documenting the country through the eyes of the sheep to share their unique life. The campaign reach exceeded 64 million people and turned out to be 98.8% positive for the brand.
How Has Social Media Marketing Evolved?
Marketing on social media platforms has undergone major changes than it was just a few years ago. What started with as a simple way for brands to communicate in one-way, has evolved into a multi-dimensional web of platforms and immersive media channels that make it easier than ever to engage with the potential audience, in almost every way.
In 2018, marketers are expected to make use of Artificial Intelligence that can help them better leverage the power of social media. iTMunch brings you a list of top six areas, which can be impacted by artificial intelligence and the tools used for it.
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4 Ways in Which AI Impacts Social Media Marketing
1. AI For Content Creation
As the success of social media is dependent on quality content, marketers are producing content at the speed of culture. According to Gartner, machines will be responsible for creating almost 20% of the content for businesses.
Although this technology was available in the past, it wasn’t as evolved as it is today. However, with the latest advancements, this method has evolved incredibly. Machine written content can now be well written and interactive, so much so that it can be difficult to identify manually written content and the content created by machines. With the help of this technology, marketers can now boost production and effectively conduct content marketing. All credit for this advancements goes to artificial intelligence. Right from creating interactive content to adding relevant hashtags, AI has changed the dynamic of social media marketing.
2. Improved Customer Intelligence With AI
The posts we share on media platforms can give useful information about the target audience. This means marketers don’t always have to spend their time and efforts in creating customer surveys.
Hence, social media marketing helps a brand understand consumer behaviour, thereby enabling them to explore newer dimensions of marketing.
But, how does artificial intelligence help brands to understand consumer behaviour? Basically, using rudimentary principles of AI, business owners are able to understand human psychology and its implications in the real world. AI collects the following user data:
- How much time does the user spend online?
- Which social media platform does the consumer spend the most time on?
- What does the consumer use each social media platform?
- Why type of content entices the consumer?
- Which product and brand get the most visibility from the consumer while they are on social media?
Using this information, businesses can easily create campaigns that are specially customized as per each user’s requirements. Moreover, this data can also help a business owner to create a personalized marketing message for each user, thereby ensuring they will bring success!
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3. The Introduction of Chatbots
Business owners often struggle to create the perfect social media bio that will entice users to convert into customers. However, the introduction of chatbots is sure to change that. It’s no secret that different users have different choices. Hence, trying to gather maximum consumer conversion through one generic bio will always be a very difficult task.
To address this problem, Chatbots were introduced. With the help of this technology, brands can study their potential customers and create a customer message, thereby considerably increasing the chances of conversion. You can simply conduct direct conversations with the consumer about products, services, customer care, etc.
Moreover, with a plethora of social media platforms available, business owners also complain about the hassle of moving from platform to platform to keep up with their potential customers. However, with the help of AI-based chatbots, businesses can easily maintain their online presence across all platforms, while effectively replying to all consumer queries and interactions. Chatbots can achieve this feat as they come integrated with the ability to respond to open questions using the Natural Learning Processing and Machine Learning. As every technological breakthrough, chatbots are also constantly evolving. Currently, businesses are focused on creating a chatbot that is intelligent enough to tackle issues immediately as they arise.
4. Reach Relevant Audience Through Campaigns
Not just organically, AI has also helped to target customers for paid campaigns more relevant and efficient. This is done using two methods; automated bidding and enhanced audience targeting.
Automated Bidding:
Much like Google ads, paid campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is a numbers game. With the integration of AI, these platforms are able to analyse the popularity of certain type of content and adjust the bid price accordingly. This will ensure that businesses get maximum results at low costs. Moreover, by integrating AI to these platforms, businesses also get the opportunity to view real-time insights for their spends, allowing them to take action according to the performance of the campaign.
Enhanced Audience Targeting:
Target audience is the most important part of paid campaigns, regardless of which social media platform you are using. After all, only if your product or service is shown to a relevant audience, will your campaign reap any benefits. With the use of AI, all the activities of relevant audience get stored, letting marketers use this information to their leverage and make necessary adjustments in their campaigns. The data AI can store include:
- Social media usage
- Online user behaviour
- Frequent buying pattern
Moreover, businesses can also expand their horizon from one social media platform to another by reaching audiences on one platform who are similar to those who have already converted on another platform. For example, if a consumer meeting certain characteristics has converted on Twitter, a similar user can be targeted on Facebook as well. This leads to better conversion and higher ROI!
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5. Improve User Experience
With new content getting published on social media platforms every second, it can be very difficult for brands to analyse what type of content consumers are looking for. That’s where AI steps in. For example, Twitter uses AI to keep track of various topics that are trending and accordingly determine where to rank them on the ‘Trending Scale’. Moreover, the platform also ranks tweets according to the scale of user preference, instead of chronologically. Hence, by tracking the information collected by Twitter, businesses can get a better idea of what type of content users are looking for.
Similarly, Facebook too makes use of AI to analyse the activity of users, in order user experience. This technology has brought a considerable amount of improvement in the social listening process. This is basically the process of tracking conversations, brands or phrases used commonly by users. This data is then used to generate content that is targeted to specific users as they have been conversing about similar topics. Hence, with the help of social listening, brands can understand customers’ likes and dislikes better and design campaigns that are sure to attract them.
6. Text Mining
With the rise in the popularity of social media, text mining is a tactic that businesses can use easily as a large number of data is readily available. This becomes easier due to AI and machine learning, which enables businesses to crunch through large volumes of data quickly. But, before we delve into how text mining can help businesses, let’s understand what is text mining:
What is text mining?
Simply put, the term ‘text mining’ refers to filtering large amount of data and extracting relevant information based on your requirements. Also known as ‘Text Analytics’, this technique helps recognize patterns and predict future actions. There are 4 stages of text mining as given below:
- Information Retrieval
Considered to be an extension of document retrieval, this step is where all the information available is collected and processed. Here, text summarization is conducted where the query of the user is understood and relevant information is shortlisted from a large amount of data available.
- Data Mining
As the name suggests, data mining is where patterns are searched for in the data available. With the help of these patterns, mining tools that utilize AI can predict behaviour and future trends. This enables businesses to make smart and data-driven decisions.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
This is one of the most difficult steps in the entire process, as it is considered to be the study of the human language for machines. NLP is conducted to enable computers to understand the meaning of a sentence in a document. This step, while challenging, is crucial, as it enables the system to move to the extraction phase.
- Information Extraction (IE)
Basically this is the end of the process where structure and relevant data is extracted from unstructured data.
Why is text mining important?
So, if you use text mining for all the data available on social media, you will be able to discover a person’s tastes, preferences, dislikes & likes, thereby enabling you to determine if they are likely to purchase your product or not.
Moreover, if you do determine that they are likely to purchase your product, then you will also be able to create a personalized campaign for them based on the data you collected.
7. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation helps you ignore all the noise and remove all the clutter and focus on just one thing; strategy. According to a study conducted by CMO, businesses that made use of automation have witnessed a 14% increase in sales productivity and 12% decresed in marketing overheads. Similar to any other online marketing strategy, automation is highly beneficial for social media as well.
Creating an effective social media strategy is not easy. With multiple platforms and users expecting a different type of content on each platform, these campaigns can require a lot of manual effort from your resources. By investing in automation, you can free up time which can be better utilized on tasks that actually require a certain skill-set and knowledge, like creating a strategy, analysing the response of the campaign and making changes accordingly and client interaction.
With the help of marketing automation, you can regulate mundane tasks like lead nurturing, scheduling content, conducting market research, data crunching, standard customer communication and many other tasks that don’t particularly require human involvement. Hence, with the help of marketing automation, you can increase productivity in your company and make your social media campaign more effective.
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