Should you be using AI to help manage social media for your business?

Whether you’re for or against it, it’s impossible to ignore the vast potential of AI. However, that doesn’t mean businesses should blindly be investing resources into the technology. To get the best outcomes, it’s important to only leverage AI tools in areas where they’ll provide the most value.

One area you might’ve considered implementing AI is within your social media presence. With these digital platforms becoming increasingly pivotal for so many aspects of modern businesses, could AI have a part to play in optimising your online presence and the customer experience? The short answer is yes; from generative AI tools to those that optimise productivity, there is so much opportunity for AI to be leveraged in a positive way on social media. That being said, there are some potential pitfalls to doing so that businesses need to be mindful of.

In this quick guide, we explore some of the pros and cons of using AI to power your social media.

Pros

Increased efficiency

Whatever the task at hand, there’s likely an AI-powered tool that can be used to increase efficiency levels. For example, generative AI tools can create both written content and graphic designs in seconds, with personalised features that ensure your brand guidelines are adhered to. Before you even get to the design stage, these tools can also be utilised for idea generation or making content calendars.

Plus, when it comes to analysing data from your platforms, AI can pull out useful insights from vast amounts of information, taking these routine tasks off your experts’ to-do lists. Saving precious time for human personnel can result in significant cost savings, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently – facilitating faster and more sustainable growth.

Better customer service

Social media is becoming an integral part of modern business customer service offerings, with more people demanding almost instantaneous feedback. According to a recent survey, 70% of customers expect a response in 24 hours or less when making a query or complaint via social media. Especially as companies expand and the volume of inquiries increases, it can be difficult to manage and meet these expectations.

Fortunately, technology – and AI in particular – can be leveraged to augment the customer experience, and bring about more helpful outcomes, faster. In fact, chatbots can provide customers with around-the-clock support, seven days a week. And, by using natural language processing, these tools can learn from huge databases to provide more tailored responses that better imitate human interactions than earlier models.

Cons

Losing the human touch

Social media thrives on genuine, personalised engagement, and AI can struggle to replicate authentic human emotions and responses. This could lead to a disconnect with the audience, as users might feel they’re interacting with impersonal, automated systems rather than real people.

This is particularly important when it comes to using social media for customer service. Chatbots and automated direct messages can be effective at finding solutions to simple problems more quickly, but for complex issues, customers can quickly become frustrated by robotic responses. Always ensure there’s a clear way for your customers to escalate their concerns to a human, if necessary.

Misinformation

AI isn’t perfect, and it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that it is. When using generative AI tools to create content, any information that’s produced should always be verified by a human. AI models, despite their sophistication, can inadvertently produce content that appears credible but is factually incorrect or misleading. This issue stems from biases in training data and the lack of human oversight in the content creation process.

As businesses increasingly rely on AI for efficiency, they must implement stringent verification processes in reviewing AI-generated content to mitigate the spread of misinformation. Publishing misinformation or information that perpetuates unconscious biases could engender mistrust among customers, while also leaving you vulnerable to potential legal repercussions.

Find the right tools

Ultimately, AI will only benefit your social media exploits if you find and leverage the most useful tools. Investing in the wrong areas will be detrimental to both your bottom line and operational efficiency. Take a structured approach to experimenting with different platforms to see which works best for you, and make sure to invest resources in staff training to ensure any tools you do utilise are being used in the right way.