The POV: How AI is Reshaping Social Media Marketing

The emergence of AI has opened new doors in social media, offering marketers with innovative tools and strategies to optimize their campaigns, better understand consumer behaviour, and tailor branded content. From personalized recommendations to sentiment analysis, AI is revolutionizing the social media landscape and redefining how brands communicate with their audiences.

Inspired by talk shows like The View, The POV is an internal team project that we’ve brought to life for you. In our latest episode, we dissect the profound impact that AI is reshaping the way businesses connect, engage, and market on social media. We explore its implications, benefits, and potential challenges as we head into 2024, so let’s get started! Check out the video by scanning the QR code below.

What you’ll learn:

• AI’s impact on social media marketing
• The evolution of AI in social media marketing
• Future of AI in social media marketing

The POV

Tanya Cruz: Good evening. Welcome to the latest episode of “The POV.” I’m your host, Tanya Cruz, and today, we have an exciting discussion on the cutting-edge AI and social media trends for the year 2024. To shed light on these trends, we have some experts with us today. First up, we have our tech reporter, Mahi Yordanos, who’s been closely following the world of AI. Welcome!

Mahi Yordanos: Thank you, Tanya! It’s great to be here.

TC: We also have a renowned social media expert, Brittni Grier, who’s been keeping an eye on the ever-evolving world of social platforms. Welcome!

Brittni Grier: Pleasure to be here.

TC: Fantastic! Let’s dive right into it. Mahi, what are some of the AI trends that we can expect to see in social media in 2024?

MY: Well, Tanya, AI is set to revolutionize social media in 2024. We’ll see a surge in AI-powered chatbots handling customer service, personalized content recommendations, and even AI-generated influencers. These influencers, created by AI, will be the next big thing on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

TC: Fascinating! Britnni, how will these AI trends impact the user experience on social media platforms?

BG: Great question, Tanya. AI will make social media more user-centric than ever. It’ll enhance content curation, helping users discover content tailored to their interests. Also, AI will play a crucial role in combating misinformation and ensuring safer online environments. We’ll see fewer fake news stories going viral.

TC: That’s promising! Mahi, could you tell us about some innovations in AI technology that will drive these trends?

MY: Absolutely, Tanya. In 2024, AI will become more intuitive and adaptable. We’re talking about AI systems that can understand context better, even humour and sarcasm, to deliver more accurate results. Moreover, AI models will become more energy-efficient, reducing their carbon footprint.

TC: These developments sound incredibly exciting! Thank you all for sharing these insights with us. It’s clear that 2024 will be a transformative year for AI and social media. 

(Continuing) Breaking news, everyone! We’ve just received an exclusive opportunity that you won’t want to miss. In addition to our discussion on AI and social media trends for 2024, we’ve managed to secure an exclusive interview with a renowned social media content creator and marketing expert. Over to Sharifa Duncan for the exclusive.

Sharifa Duncan: Hi Tom Yawney, we’ve got a lot to cover!

Questions

1. Can you explain how AI is currently being used in social media marketing, and how has it evolved over the past few years?

So a real challenge for social media managers is constantly coming up with new ideas, new creative approaches, different captions that keep things fresh and interesting when you’ve been working on an account for a long period of time. 

So one of the really important things that AI has brought to the table is the ability to help you brainstorm, help you iterate, provide new ideas, and just unlock a little bit more creativity that you can bring to the table. This also comes in the form of competitive reviews, where it can give you sort of details on what the competition is doing, where you fit within the competitive landscape—strengths, opportunities, threats—and that can certainly be helpful when it comes to planning for different campaigns and opportunities. 

And also, sometimes social media managers can sort of run into a challenge of constantly trying to come up with different captions that are a little bit unique and interesting when you’re talking about the same brand over and over and over that can become a challenge. So certainly AI can help a lot with that, just in terms of refreshing your caption writing. 

The main difference in terms of how AI has really transformed social is that it wasn’t doing this not that long ago, these things were simply not available in the same fashion. So it’s certainly become something that is a tool that is available to people to enrich their work.

2. With the rise of AI-generated content and chatbots, how do you see the role of human content creators evolving in the future of social media marketing?

So with the rise of AI-generated content and how that’s going to impact human content creators, I think in the near term what you’re going to find is it’s going to operate like an assistant. 

Again, it’s going to be helping with competitive reviews, helping generate captions, and iterating off of captions help things stay fresh. It’s gonna help you come up with new ideas when you’ve hit a bit of a creative roadblock and you’re not exactly sure how to break through. It’s going to kind of be that supporting piece that can help you break through. 

In the longer term, I think we’re already seeing where this is headed a little bit. If you think about the Hollywood writers strike: they built AI rules because they were concerned about AI writers, writing shows and kind of cutting out humans. You’re seeing it in the music space, you know, AI, Drake comes out with a hit and people find it kind of interesting at the time. It’s a novel concept, but that’s a legitimate threat to the industry if AI can just create music that could put humans out of work. 

So in the longer term in the long run, as AI continues to evolve, I think you’re gonna see more regulation and more discussion around how it can be used, what it can be used for, and certain mechanisms put in place like what happened with the Hollywood writers protecting themselves against AI to ensure that humans are not giving up too much to this AI technology, and that we maintain that human element.

3. How do you see AI influencing the creation of compelling visual content, such as videos and graphics, for social media marketing campaigns?

Alright, so in terms of how AI will influence the sort of creation of compelling visual content, I think that’s going to come in a few different forms. 

You’re already seeing with like Adobe Photoshop. In the past, you would need to have pretty specific skills in terms of post-production editing—which would be a little bit more time intensive—and it would take some specific training to be able to operate that tool effectively. Nowadays, even Adobe is coming out with tools that just ‘click, remove’, ‘click’, ‘add’, ‘drop’, ‘replace’. [It’s] really, really simple stuff that is AI-generated software that’s going to make post-production much more efficient, I think you’re gonna see that coming in a variety of forms and that’s already happening right now. That’s only going to continue for sure in the long run.

On the platform side, you’re also going to see that all of these platforms are already using AI in terms of how they optimize and make decisions; in terms of how they serve different pieces of content to different communities. That’s just going to get fueled more and more and more and become smarter and smarter and smarter over time. 

I think in the longer run, you’re gonna have some brands, perhaps some agencies—and you see people nibbling at this a little bit right now, but I’m sure it’ll happen more in the future—that are going a little bit more all in and trying to just sort of get rid of human jobs and allow AI to sort of take that over, thinking that they could save a lot of money. The early returns on that type of approach are not so good right now. At this stage, there definitely needs to be a human element involved to guide these things. I don’t think AI is at the point—at least in terms of sort of widely used technology—where it’s operating at that level. 

In the longer run, you know, you might see some companies go that way. I do think personally, that there’s always a human touch that comes along [and] that we won’t be able to fully translate to AI. So I do see it as a complementary tool versus something that would fully take over from a creative perspective.

4. What advice would you give to businesses looking to incorporate AI into their social media marketing strategies for the first time? Are there any common pitfalls to avoid?

In terms of advice for businesses that might be looking to incorporate AI into their social media marketing strategies, I think start with the basics, right? 

When you’re stuck on captions, use it to help unlock a little bit more creativity. When you’re looking to understand what’s happening in your competitive landscape or vertical, it can offer some additional insights that might have otherwise taken you hours or days to uncover. So there are some sort of simple things that you can do that, just again, AI can operate as an assistant sort of enriching the work that you’re currently doing. 

In terms of pitfalls, what I would say to avoid is don’t think that at this moment it’s going to solve all your problems that you can, you know, replace a whole bunch of people with AI. It’s still in this moment based on inputs that deliver outputs. So somebody has to input that information, which then yields that output. And then that output needs to be actioned. 

So for now, it is a tool to enrich what you’re doing, and to act as sort of like a complementary piece which can be a bit of an assistant to that individual. But to think that it’s just going to absolutely take over in terms of certain roles that exist right now, we are not there at this moment. It is really something that can help support and enrich your current work.

5. In your opinion, what does the future hold for the intersection of AI and social media marketing, and how can businesses stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving landscape?

Alright, so what does the future holds in terms of the intersection between social media and AI? So first of all, from a practical standpoint: for brands [and] for agencies, it’s going to be a complimentary piece and enriching piece, something that can help with creativity and help you just continue to punch upwards in terms of the quality of your creative, your storytelling, your caption writing. It should be a truly helpful piece to help round out what you’re doing as you can pull different information and data points from AI to help you craft smarter campaigns, more intelligent campaigns, more thoughtful campaigns. So it should be a very helpful enriching tool to a lot of brands and agencies out there.

You’re also seeing now that a lot of celebrities are lending their likeness and their ‘AI bots’ in terms of chatbots. So like, right now, Meta has already negotiated deals with Snoop Dogg and Mr. Beast and Kendall Jenner where they can create chatbots of that individual for you to talk with that person. [It] seems like you’re actually talking about hanging out with that person; I think you’re gonna see more competition within the AI space for celebrity likeness, and creating those types of chatbots and really immersive experiences that will probably start to get into web three and Metaverse and it will become a little bit more intertwined. So you can kind of foresee that that web three-piece is going to get pushed more and more in AI is going to have a big role in that. 

Now thinking about the problem, pitfalls, and potential perils of this technology, obviously, disinformation, misinformation, and deep fakes have been an issue already for a number of years, even before AI sort of became as big as it has here in 2023. It’s only going to get more challenging to control these things as AI continues to evolve—it’s going to be pouring gas on that one for sure. 

So when you think about it, social platforms have really been under the thumb of many governments and regulatory bodies as it relates to these topics. What are you doing to prevent these things from happening? What are you doing to protect the public from consuming information that is not correct but is sort of leading them down the wrong path or potentially creating rallies for, you know, a negative cause or leading to terrible humanitarian issues in different parts of the world? These are real things that are happening and it’s going to be very, very difficult to tell the difference between content that is AI-created versus what is actually, legitimately real. There’s going to be more and more and more pressure and scrutiny and inevitably regulation on these AI companies, on AI content and technology to protect the public from misinformation [and] from disinformation. That’s going to be a real, real continuous hot-button topic in the years to come.

Back to The POV 

SD: Thank you, Tom, for taking the time to sit down with me to discuss the evolving landscape of social media and AI. Back to you, Tanya. 

TC: Welcome back, everyone! We’ve just wrapped up an insightful interview with our special guest, the social media content creator and marketing expert. I hope you found their insights as enlightening as we did.

(Continuing) As we wrap up today’s episode of “The POV,” I’d like to thank our incredible guests for sharing their expertise and shedding light on the exciting future that awaits us. And of course, a big thank you to you, our viewers, for joining us today. We’ll continue to keep you updated on the latest tech trends and innovations that shape our world.

(Continuing) Until next time, I’m Tanya, signing off from “The POV.” Have a wonderful day, everyone!