There are more than 3.3 billion social media users across the globe. Each one of those users is engaging with others in their networks every day. As a result, savvy businesses reap the benefits of well-implemented social media campaigns. But, if you’re running a business, it can be difficult to keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape. You need to be sure you’re integrating the best technology into your social media strategies and getting the most out of every possible interaction. One popular strategy is artificial intelligence, which plays a huge role in boosting engagement for users and businesses alike.
Meaningful interactions
In early 2018, Facebook made major changes to its algorithm that favor meaningful interactions. It’s not enough to invite followers to like, comment and share your content. Instead, you should aim for organic interaction driven by interesting content. The updated algorithm uses artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through posts and prioritize those that will spark back-and-forth conversations and move them to the top of your newsfeed.
Additionally, over the past year, Reactions have taken off since their introduction in 2017. Facebook places more importance on posts you respond to with emotive reactions such as “wow” or “angry” as opposed to a simple like. Facebook’s algorithm will take that information and use it to move those posts and posts like them up in your Newsfeed. “We’ve found that if people leave a reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal they’d want to see that post,” Facebook spokesperson stated in an interview with Mashable.
Ranking content
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram collect user-data via AI technology. AI can take massive amounts of unstructured data, such as comments, likes, retweets and favorites, and make sense of it, pulling out trends and patterns for each user. This data can be used to rank content differently for each user’s feed, placing the content users will most likely engage with at the top of their feeds.
In addition to using data to perfect a user’s feed, social media outlets are implementing AI image recognition to further promote interaction between users. Facebook uses the technology to intelligently tag photos and recognizes friends’ faces. Twitter’s algorithm automatically crops photos to show the most attention-grabbing part of an image in thumbnails on each user’s timeline, increasing the likelihood others will interact with the post.
Customer service
A large component of social media management is responding to customer feedback. Responding to customers creates direct engagement between your company and its clients. 80 percent of consumers use social media to engage with companies. Whether that is to tweet a complaint or leave a review on Yelp, 80 per cent is too big of a number to ignore. AI programs do a better job of keeping up with customer engagement than a human forming response could.
These programs come in the form of chatbots that can automatically respond to customer comments, tweets and mentions with company-created, conversational responses to common queries. Some are even evolved enough to create custom responses through neural networks. Silicon Valley executive, Mark Hurd, recognizes the benefits of automation, stating “when you automate something, the service gets better while things get done faster.” Through the automation of these conversations, customers get prompter responses, resulting in a higher level of satisfaction and engagement.
AI-powered content sharing
Almost everyone has heard the phrase “content is king.” The better your content, the more organic engagement you’ll generate. AI content tools boost your posts and get them in front of the right people. They pay attention to when your followers are most active and post content during that time. The programs also re-share your high-traffic posts at optimal times to get them in front of an even bigger audience.
In addition to sharing your own content, AI has the ability to follow trending topics in your niche and curate posts from other people’s social channels that would be of interest to your followers. Not only does this provide even more opportunity for members of your community to interact with you, but it also allows you to engage with the other companies or people you’re sharing content from, increasing your engagement possibilities.
