Artificial intelligence has been around for over 40 years but recently it is getting a lot more popular and is expanding every day. AI is changing and we can do so much more with it now. Artificial intelligence by definition is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” It has many uses in many different things, one I believe is very important and so useful is social media monitoring.
Artificial intelligence is huge in marketing and making customized advertisements for consumers. “AI can analyze massive amounts of customer data and deliver highly personalized experiences for each customer, increasing engagement and loyalty.” (Lamaj). AI can monitor what people like, post, who they follow, and what they interact with most. So it can target these users and provide them with advertisements in their interest. This results in brands getting more people engaging with their advertisements and more revenue. Just one example is Facebook’s Deeptext AI, which processes the text in content that is posted so that it can determine the user’s interests. Then it can provide the user with more advertisements that they are more likely to be interested in. AI now makes it so much easier for social media marketers who now don’t have to go through all of the repetitive tasks.
Now instead of a brand or company having to respond to so many messages at once, AI can be used to respond to certain things and help with social engagement. An example of this is Cloohawk. It is basically an assistant that analyzes brands’ target users and their activities to help suggest and improve social engagement. It can analyze your data or even other competitors’ profiles and activity. AI chatbots can also respond to messages for brands and companies so it is quick and efficient. Consumers don’t have to wait around for a response anymore. If the text is too complicated it can be passed onto a human, but these chatbots can surprisingly respond to many different messages and questions. It is said that AI can handle about 85% or more of customer service inquiries.
AI is a lot quicker than humans and can process data in the fraction of a time that a human would. This results in real time optimization, which lets companies respond fast to all market changes and change their strategies accordingly. Humans sometimes can not keep up with all the changes going on in social media daily. Social media is quick and changes rapidly, AI is what we use to catch all of that data. We can’t be expected to sit and try to find every little change going on, but luckily artificial intelligence is there to do that for us.
Tools such as social listening can listen to what people are saying about a certain brand and help discover new trends and some new target audiences. Some questions that social listening can help with are who is your audience, what does your audience want, when is your audience engaging with you, where is your audience active and engaged, why does your audience talk about you, and how can you better serve your audience? Answering these questions can turn into more revenue and all over better content.
Social listening can help so much in competitive analysis, social media is a very competitive place for many companies and brands. With social listening it helps brands figure out what their competitors seem to fail in, which helps see how they can beat them in that and improve. As it can find companies failing, it can also find what others are doing better than them and strive to get better at that particular thing. Brands can also find out quickly how their consumers are feeling and talking about their company product or other companies products. Which helps them figure out how to do better than their competitors. It is very helpful seeing what other companies are doing, so you can differentiate your brand from others and do what they aren’t. They can also find what influencer that is sponsoring their product is doing the best and getting them the most views and purchases.
Artificial intelligence can also be a great tool in detecting fake accounts. Facebook uses AI for getting rid of things like hate speech, fake accounts, terrorism, graphic violence, and others off of its platforms. Social media can be a very hateful and harmful place sometimes and often can affect users in bad ways. I myself have seen some very graphic posts and negative comments that I think would be great if they could be detected quickly and got rid of. It is difficult for real people to find these kinds of posts and delete them so quickly, but AI is there to help and process them faster. Facebook has stated that “AI systems have already taken down more than half a million scam accounts”. Facebook has also been able to get rid of a lot of terrorist content. It claims that “99% of ISIS or Al-Qaeda content is removed even before being reported by users.” AI is also used to detect people expressing suicide ideation, in some extreme cases first responders can be alerted. So not only is the AI preventing people from seeing negative posts, it is also saving lives and helping struggling people.
Another great and useful way people can utilize artificial intelligence is writing captions for them. Brands need to promote and get out posts quickly so people can see them and be more engaged. By using AI they can create what they want to say in seconds. One example of this can be, HelloWoofy, it uses artificial intelligence to suggest autocomplete options for text, emojis, and hashtags. It can also automatically suggest pull quotes and checks for compliance. This helps brands know what to say to optimize consumers engagement in their post.
Artificial intelligence is an amazing thing and is helpful in so many ways, but it can also be deceiving. AI has the power to make very deceiving fake videos that can be used to spread false information to viewers. “AI generated fake videos first caught the public’s attention in late 2017, when a Reddit account with the name Deepfakes posted pornographic videos generated with a DNN-based face-swapping algorithm.”, (Lyu). Now it has spread rapidly and there are many videos of people being impersonated. These fake AI generated videos can be a huge problem in political elections, some videos have already arisen of political people saying things they never said. These videos can be posted just hours before an election and cause lots of confusion before they are able to be debunked and proven fake, which causes people to panic and change their vote quickly.
There are ways to detect them, but some people cannot and believe what they see. These deepfakes will continue to grow and be even harder to tell if they are real or not. With new technology and more people interested in them, we have to be careful not to believe everything that we are seeing. When it was just face swapping before, they could get even more detailed to whole-head synthesis , joint audiovisual synthesis and even whole-body synthesis. As these are advancing, there will also be more technology advancing to detect them quicker and make it known they are not real.
Considering all of this, artificial intelligence can be a very great and helpful thing, especially for marketing on social media. It can be used easily to monitor many posts and people and assist brands online. Unwanted posts and content is now being easily tracked and reported as soon as it is uploaded. AI can also be deceiving in ways and help to create fake news and worry many people. Overall I believe it to be helpful and it is improving everyday with a new range of activities. I think that AI will keep gaining popularity and be a huge thing for many people.
Works Cited
Kaput, Mike. “What Is Artificial Intelligence for Social Media?” Marketing AI Institute, Marketing AI Institute, 27 July 2022, https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/what-is-artificial-intelligence-for-social-media.
Lamaj, Denisa. “How Is AI Used in Social Media Marketing? 4 Use Cases.” Publer’s Blog, 11 Feb. 2023, https://publer.io/blog/how-is-ai-used-in-social-media/#:~:text=Personalization%3A%20AI%20can%20analyze%20massive,use%20to%20improve%20marketing%20strategies.
Quadros, Mark. “Artificial Intelligence in Social Media Marketing.” Emplifi, 21 Sept. 2020, https://emplifi.io/resources/blog/ai-in-social-media.
Terdiman, Daniel. Here’s How Facebook Uses AI to Detect Many Kinds of Bad Content. 2 May 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40566786/heres-how-facebook-uses-ai-to-detect-many-kinds-of-bad-content.
Hanu, Laura. “How AI Is Learning to Identify Toxic Online Content.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 8 Feb. 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-identify-toxic-online-content/.
Lyu, Siwei. “Deepfakes and the New AI-Generated Fake Media Creation-Detection Arms Race.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 20 July 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/detecting-deepfakes1/.