5 AI-Powered Tools for Social Media

5 AI-Powered Tools for Social Media

Technology changes rapidly and keeping up with those changes can be a challenge. Take artificial intelligence or AI as an example. Not only are well-established social media platforms and tools incorporating AI-powered features into their offerings, but there are new AI-focused companies launching every month.

Some of the early viable options for using AI are research, customer service enhancements such as chatbots, and branding design and logo generation. As the technology continues to mature, AI is proving to be potentially useful in many other areas of marketing.

Here are 5 types of tools where AI is having an impact on social media marketing.

Monitoring and Measuring

1. Social listening - One of the more time-consuming social media tasks is monitoring what is being said about your brand or about topics relevant to your company, industry, and local region. Listening tools incorporating AI technology can not only scour search engines and online forums rapidly to gather data, but they can also summarize the findings in the blink of an eye.

A company like Brandwatch uses AI to help you gather content online related to your brand and then analyzes it to help you understand spikes in sentiment and other insights. SproutSocial assigns a sentiment to other people's comments on your posts and its tool, AI Assist, can help you compose appropriate responses to comments and queries, speeding up customer service.

2. Competitor insights - AI tools such as Semrush can help you gain a more thorough look at what your competitors are doing on social media or even more broadly, how they are conducting business. Some of the data the tool can provide includes an analysis of traffic to a competitor's website, a summary of their promotion strategies, and recommendations on how you can grow your market share based on what your competitors are doing.

Creation and Production

3. Captions and hashtags - Composing social media post captions can be a chore for any business owner, particularly when it isn't the main part of running a business. Whether you're a company of one, have a small team sharing the social posting load, or have a person or team dedicated to social media, getting additional assistance compiling content and composing post captions for multiple social networks can save time. Content Studio is just one example of a social media dashboard company offering AI writing tools to craft Instagram captions, rewriting or rephrasing tips, and hashtag generation.

4. Graphics and photo creation - Not everyone is a designer or photographer which can illustrate your social media captions a challenge. While there is an abundance of royalty-free stock image sites, sometimes finding the right one seems impossible. AI generated art continues to grow in popularity, with applications such as Dall-E and Midjourney leading the way and companies like Canva and Adobe adding these creative capabilities into their suite of design tools. The caveat with AI-generated images is that the technology is not perfect so some images may be slightly distorted. Always check the results carefully before publishing.

5. Music generation - Sound and music tracks can add interest to a post, whether a static image, animation, or video. As with images, there are many royalty-free sound and music sites you can scour to try to find the right one to complement your content, however, AI-powered sound and music generating sites now give you more creative control over the audio you use. An app like Suno can take your text prompts and genre preference, or even your original lyrics, and almost instantly compose a complete song including instruments and vocals. With a paid Suno subscription, you can retain the ownership of the music produced.

At this time, per the Patent and Trademark Office, copyrights are not available for AI-produced content as copyrights are for works created by human beings, not machines. However, as with many laws, they may change over time to accommodate new technology developments.

If you're looking for AI tools to add to your social media toolkit, searching Google can produce a list for you - with the assistance of the search engine's AI Overviews and the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE). Yes, even search engines are using AI technology.