First things first. What is social media engagement? Social media engagement refers to the estimate of how people connect with your social media accounts and content (whether personal or business accounts). Social media engagement can refer to different activities on various social media platforms worldwide. And these activities we refer to as engagements on social media platforms mean: likes, replies, DMs, comments, retweets, clicks, mentions, and shares.

According to Datareportal's April 2023 global assessment, 4.80 billion people use social media worldwide, which is more than half of the world's population (60%). That's a sea of people any business can reach from any part of the world. And even though your business can reach one-third of this population, it is still massive, especially in helping its business grow.

How does social media engagement impact businesses and their growth? First, businesses can directly connect with their target audience and potential customers from any part of the world. Then, the connection through comments, DMs, mentions, clicks, and shares, among others, helps businesses gather relevant data that would help guide their operations with their target customers. Additionally, social media engagement increases businesses' visibility the world over.

The above is a whole lot of benefits businesses enjoy from social media engagement. And to make it faster, easier, and more productive, AI has been integrated into social media. Continue reading to find out five ways your business can benefit from utilizing AI on social media.

Advantages of using AI tools in social media 

There are many advantages to using AI-powered social media tools for your business's social media platforms. Let's look at some of these advantages and ways AI-powered tools can help boost your business productivity through social media.

1. Create stunning images

One major reason you bring your business to any social media platform is to be able to reach your target audience. Yes, because social media is a marketing strategy. But also know that there's no social media marketing without captivating and eye-catching visuals. 

Just imagine only sharing written content about your brand without images. The first result you would get is poor engagement. If the reverse is the case (written content backed by stunning images), your business will experience lofty engagement and visibility.

For business owners (especially small businesses), marketers, and social media managers, creating images is one of their most difficult tasks. But with AI-powered social media tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, and DreamStudio you can comfortably generate stunning images that are personalized and branded quickly. 

These AI image generators only require an idea from you to create a beautiful image. For instance, Midjourney may create original visuals entirely without the need for manual design work using images, GIFs, video clips, text overlays, and illustrations.

2. Writing Stop-scrolling captions

What are stunning images without captions? And what is the use of captions that lack persuasion and are full of cliches? Well-written content lets the target audience see, feel, perceive, taste, and hear about your business through words.

With AI-powered caption-generating tools like Copyai, ChatGPT, and storylab.ai, you can generate stop-scrolling captions for your social media posts, product descriptions, landing pages, advertisements, and even blog posts without wasting time.

You only need to enter your prompt, website or product URL, or hashtag, and the AI will create intriguing captions that resonate with your brand and target audience. These tools are especially beneficial to startups because they're free and very easy to use.

3. For generating content

There's a popular saying that "content is king". But there are times we run out of content ideas. But that's in the past. With AI tools for social media solutions, you can generate content ideas that are specific to your target audience.

However, AI tools won't start writing with your prompts. So you only need to enter a few keywords or subjects (usually referred to as prompts), and the tools will produce original ideas for articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and more depending on what you want to write on. 

4.  To seek direction for your content strategy

Business is a competition, and for you to have a market share, you must be strategic and unique with your content ideas. Moreover, it can be challenging to predict with certainty what kind of content will appeal to your audience. You may test out several tactics and even use analytics to determine which ones are effective, but these methods are time-consuming. So without wasting so much time, you can gain profound insights into the needs and feelings of your target audience by using AI-powered products like Brandwatch. On Brandwatch, real-time sentiment analysis is available across different social media platforms. This allows you to choose which topics to engage in and which to avoid. You can also determine who the key players are in any topic and how best to craft your content to get the most interaction and engagement.

5. Handling Advertisement 

Businesses conduct social media advertisements for different purposes. One area where AI software has been useful for years is improving social media advertising operations. Social media AI tools help you maximize your advertisement operations by helping you perform tasks like target audience analysis, selecting the proper audience, managing your budget, developing bidding strategies, automating the ad, keeping track of performance, designing ad campaigns, and even writing the ad copy. Another amusing thing is that AI tools perform these tasks faster and more effectively. This leads to more successful advertising and a higher rate of return on advertising.

5 AI tools that can be used to build a social media presence

In this section, we'll be discussing five AI tools you can use to boost your business's social media presence.

1. Brand Watch

Brandwatch uses Hootsuite insight to analyze social media trends, key players, customers' sentiments, etc. The software is designed to evaluate bulk data and generate insights and statistics for businesses to understand how best to tailor their content for their target audience. In order to generate summaries of data sets in natural language, Brandwatch also connects with other AI software like ChatGPT. So users of Hootsuite can easily integrate Brandwatch's search features into their Hootsuite account to gain a much-needed advantage over their competitors. The software is for marketing teams and businesses that are interested in monitoring audiences on social media.

2. ChatGPT

After analyzing industry trends and understanding which perspective to tailor your content from, you need an AI content-generating tool to proceed further. For this, you need ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is like the king of all AI tools. This AI tool is suitable for almost all social media activities, especially those that involve writing. Business owners, social media managers, and content creators utilize ChatGPT to generate captions and lengthy posts. With explicit prompting and direction, businesses can use ChatGPT to achieve a proper tone and content that are personalized and tailored to their brand voice.

3. Stockimg.ai

Earlier in this article, I noted that stunning images contribute to your brand's high social media engagement. But do you ever have a great post idea but struggle to find the perfect stock image to go with it? Stocking.ai is your alternative to endlessly searching through stock footage websites. Simply input a prompt, and stockimg.ai will spit forth images for you. Then you can Select from vintage stock images, drawings, book covers, wallpaper, posters, logos, and artwork. This AI image generator is primarily for social media marketers, designers, and content writers. It is also for businesses of all sizes looking to maintain an impressive social media presence.

4. Heyday

After optimizing your business's social media presence through persuasive captions and captivating visuals, what next? You would definitely be expecting high engagement. This is why we have Heyday in this tool collection. Hootsuite created Heyday, a conversational AI chatbot, to assist businesses in raising customer satisfaction ratings and e-commerce sales. Businesses and individuals can use Heyday as a time-saving selling tool in their social media campaigns. The AI tool responds to consumer questions, including DMs, 24/7. This way, you won't have potential customers hanging in your DMs for too long without a customer service attendant. This way, you can also focus on expanding your business. Heyday is primarily for social media marketing teams, customer care teams, and e-commerce businesses.

5. Peech

For social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram that basically thrive on video content, the next AI tool you need to improve your business's social media presence is a video editing AI tool. Peech is a video editing AI tool that uses AI to automatically transcribe, edit, repurpose, and brand your video footage. To help you scale your video efforts, Peech creates high-quality video content using NLP (natural language processing) technology. It is even trained to identify the members of your team and display a title card whenever they appear. Or have your video footage automatically transcribed so you can use it in blogs or captions. Without prior experience with video editing, Peech makes it simple to brand and edit video material. Peech is for businesses of all sizes. And if you're a marketer, educator, or content creator, you need it just as much.

Challenges with using AI in social media

In areas like health, tech, education, transportation, etc. where AI applications are already gargantuan, there have been specific challenges this disruptive technology poses. So it's not safe to think there wouldn't be challenges applying AI to social media. The possibility of disseminating inaccurate or misleading information is the first challenge. So although AI tools have the potential to be extremely accurate, they also have an oversight tendency—a tendency to make up facts, statistics, and other pieces of information.

However, to curb this challenge, users must keep an eye on the results AI generates as social media and AI continue to merge. Always perform a plagiarism check before releasing text generated by AI. There's also the challenge of ethical and legal concerns. This is not only a challenge but somewhat a threat to lives. Because AI can be manipulated against vulnerable groups, invade privacy, and influence user behavior. Hence, businesses must be mindful of the potential ethical and legal ramifications of using AI technology and train team members accordingly.

Moreover, there's the challenge of data insecurity. This is one of the life-threatening challenges AI tools pose in general. Data, which is the fuel for AI, can be invaded if not properly secured. Especially if your business deals with sensitive consumer information like banking, health, or other private details. You have to be extremely careful and have a thorough social media policy in place before putting any AI tool into use in your business. Doing this means you're safeguarding customers' data and preventing personality theft.

Lastly, there's the challenge of compliance and acceptance of AI on social media. The reason for this is that the application of AI to social media is still relatively new. As a result, it's crucial to consult your legal and compliance departments before employing AI tools or allowing a bot to communicate with your customers on your social media platforms. This will help your business avoid pending conflicts of interest and regulatory violations in your industry.

What impact do AI tools have on the team? 

This is the point at which you ask yourself "Will AI have to replace the social media manager of my business"? Of course, social media managers are one of those who are constantly reminded that AI will render their services obsolete in the near future. But will this really happen? The answer is a loud "NO". Why? It's undeniable that AI can automate some aspects of social media management, like advertisement operations, responding to DMs, and analyzing data, among others. Yet, it cannot take on the role of human social media managers' imagination and foresight. 

Also, it's impossible for AI to replace your business's social media manager because of the many challenges we discussed earlier. First, AI-generated content cannot even be trusted. You need the human factor to constantly cross-check information, facts, data, and statistics to be sure they're accurate and to edit where necessary. You also need your social media manager to insert the prompt that AI tools need to function. which, without them, are useless. 

So even though AI will be utilized to help social media teams become more effective and efficient, there's no evidence that it's capable of replacing your social media manager or team members. People will always be the driving force behind successful social media management.

Final thoughts

Combining AI with social media helps businesses interact with audiences worldwide. AI tools help businesses quickly generate eye-catching images, appealing captions, and content ideas to attract their target audience. AI applications in social media have been helpful in customer needs research, branding strategy, task automation, and advertising. AI can't, however, take on the role of social media manager because of the many challenges it poses. 

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