Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the past year has been huge for AI. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 made the abilities of generative AI mainstream knowledge, AI has inspired a whole wave of creators and forward-thinking business minds to use this exciting technology for new applications.
Social media marketing professionals are beginning to embrace AI tools for various different areas of their campaigns, ranging from simple tasks like cleaning up copy to predictive analytics that informs an entire strategy.
If you’re looking to learn more about AI and what it means for your brand, here’s five AI social media marketing trends to follow in 2024.
1. Generative AI
Perhaps the most influential AI social media marketing trends is the rise in generative AI tools, which have already had a huge impact on content across several marketing channels.
One of the most widespread uses for generative AI in social media is tools that create written content for specific brand identities and use cases, like our own range of Highperformr features built for tasks like writing posts for LinkedIn and X (Twitter), generating post ideas, and more.
Generative AI has also been used for dozens of other media formats to help build compelling social media content, such as images, videos, and even music.
While some argue the influx of AI-generated content has hurt certain campaigns by causing a lot of them to look and sound the same, marketers who go out of their way to draft quality briefs or augment original content with AI tools are seeing a huge increase in productivity, without sacrificing anything in the way of quality. Highperformr’s Social AI solves this issue by personalizing all the content ideas using and ensuring that every piece of content and every idea is tailored to the individual.
2. Advanced Audience Targeting
One of the biggest benefits of AI is its ability to sort through massive sets of audience data, pick up patterns a human analyst might miss, and then use their findings to make informed tweaks to the way you target your ads and organic content.
The benefits of this for marketers are twofold. First, it will mean the ads you create enjoy more refined targeting, and exposure to more specific segments of your audience who are most likely to interact with them. Secondly, when combined with the power of generative AI, AI-powered social media targeting will be able to adapt the messaging to the specific person who’s viewing it, going even further to maximize the chances of follows, click-throughs, and ultimately conversion.
As the well-established preference for personalized marketing continues, the early adoption of these kinds of tools will begin to separate the winners from the losers in both paid and organic social media marketing.
3. More Effective Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the most familiar uses of AI in marketing, having been used by brands in some form or another for well over 20 years now.
When chatbots first became a common sight, they were often the butt of the joke, making a lot of users roll their eyes and wish they could talk to a human. With the proliferation of natural language processing, however, we’re starting to see far more capable chatbots who are poised to change the standards of social media marketing.
Chatbot integrations on social media messaging apps like Instagram and Facebook Messenger are already helping businesses to deal with queries more efficiently. As large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini develop, and people are more inclined to talk to chatbots instead of wave them off, a chatbot’s experience with your customer base will only make them more effective at understanding who a user is and how best to solve their query.
As this technology develops further, sophisticated chatbots could even see use as a way to augment sales, guiding people from a query through the stages of your sales funnel and ultimately to a sale.
4. Influencer Targeting
AI and machine learning has been applied to the realm of analytics for some time, and its powerful applications are becoming more visible as the technology develops.
Tools such as Highperformr analytics platform come equipped with an AI assistant feature designed to highlight trends in your metrics and help you adjust your social media campaigns for greater success. For example, if there’s a sudden spike in engagement on one of your posts about using a certain tool, AI will be able to recognize the theme of the text and recommend that you develop more content around this tool.
AI can also be useful for finding new prospective influencers for your brand, picking up on signs of engagement with your brand alongside criteria such as the account’s number of followers and their average engagement rate. This will make it easier to create curated lists of influencers who might be a good match for your program, and save you a lot of time which would otherwise be spent trawling and checking accounts manually.
5. Content Recognition and Competitor Research
One of the most exciting AI social media marketing trends is the use of visual content recognition and the potential implications this has on the future of competitor research.
AI-powered image recognition software is already starting to make an impact on the user experience on social media platforms, for example in the form of Pinterest Lens, which enables users to point their phone camera at objects to find related content on the platform. Marketers who study engagements involving these kinds of tools will be able to optimize their content for their increasing use, and make their own posts more visible specifically for image recognition searches.
Looking into the future, it’s thought that this kind of technology will soon be used for researching trends in competitor analysis campaigns and finding inspiration for your own campaigns.
Imagine, for example, that a tool is able to analyze an array of competitor posts that are all above a certain engagement threshold. A robust image recognition AI will be able to see that their visual content has common threads, such as portraying people of a certain age range, taking part in a certain activity, or even focusing a certain color palette. These kinds of observations could be compared to your own post calendar, and help you make content creation decisions to improve your rate of engagement.
While image recognition AI is still finding its feet in terms of social media marketing applications, following its progress closely could help you become an early adopter as it becomes more impactful in 2024 and beyond.
Harnessing AI Social Media Marketing Trends
AI social media marketing trends are quickly picking up momentum, and turning this era into one of the most exciting times to spearhead a new social media campaign. By learning how to use AI tools, keeping up with industry thought leaders, and thinking of new and creative applications for AI, you’ll be able to supercharge efficiencies in your marketing and enjoy significantly stronger campaigns.
To get a taste of what generative and analytical AI can do for your social media campaigns, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
