April 26, 2019 6 min read

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With over 31.25 million Facebook posts per minute, 6000 tweets per second and 95 million Instagram posts every day, it’s genuinely commendable how top social media influencers can work their way through big data analytics and present relevant and timely content to their respective industries.

Whether they focus on tech, fashion, fitness, business or beauty, influencers are continually learning and improving to stay ahead of their competition. With sufficient exposure to AI and machine learning solutions created to help social media marketing, you can also increase your social media conversion rates.  

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John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in the field of AI, defined artificial intelligence as “the science of making machines that can perform tasks that are characteristic of human intelligence.” These tasks may include understanding language, translating content between languages, recognizing elements in images and speech or making decisions.

Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to learn without needing a rigid set of rules. Scientists achieve this by showing the system several examples until it starts to learn over time and predict more accurately.

A proper understanding and implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning guarantees success in social media marketing. These solutions provide you with a strong knowledge of your audience, your competition (and their efforts to reach the same or similar audience) and the kinds of content that inspire that audience to take action in ways that move the needle for your business

Related: Chriselle Lim Started Out as a Wardrobe Stylist. Now She Has More Than 3 Million Social Media Followers.

By using social media AI and machine learning tools, influencers can study and understand their audience and competitors, and then implement proper content positioning.

To help arm you with the insights you need to create the most relevant content for your industry based on data — not hunches — here are six ways that top influencers are implementing AI and machine learning to grow their followers.

1. Social listening and monitoring

Social listening and monitoring tools are some of the most widely used in social media marketing.

Social listening is different from social monitoring, in that monitoring is merely seeing what people are saying about your brand, whereas social listening tracks conversations around specific phrases, words, or brands, and leverages that data to find opportunities or create specialized content for particular audiences. These capabilities are powerful ways of interacting with audiences in real time — and they can help you tailor your voice to better connect with them.

Some examples of social monitoring tools are Sprout and Mention. They track and report these insights and alert you when relevant conversations are happening.    

2. Competitor analysis 

Social media influencers take advantage of AI’s ability to scrape and analyze massive data sets to track and analyze their competitors. How?

With AI, you can effectively run all the same analysis that you perform on your pages on competitors as well. This gives you an idea of what is working, and allows you to integrate the best strategies and techniques into your social media marketing strategy.

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The tools available implement social listening and sentiment analysis, and they analyze content to decipher the qualities that impact performance such as keywords, color, visual objects and content type.

Examples of platforms that do all this are Cortex, Crimson Hexagon and Simply Measured.

3. Content optimization

The next step after understanding your audience, your industry’s landscape, and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses is planning and developing relevant and insightful content. AI and machine learning software have been designed to help you get the right mix of text, photo and video to help diversify your feed and keep your audience interested.  

Cortex was founded to bring machine learning into marketing via improving the creation and deployment of content. It implements an in-depth analysis of data sets to allow you to know which kinds of content do better than others.

4. Content creation

AI bots are being designed to assist with auto responding to messages on social media platforms, totally automate content such as earnings reports, news headlines, and interview or webinar transcriptions. For content that can’t be completely automated, there are tools to help make content creation quicker and more comfortable. 

Related: This Style Blogger Got Her Start in Her Dorm Room. Today She Has Over a Million Followers and a Fashion Line.

Tools like Foresight look at trends on your page and your competitors’ pages to let you know what types of content resonate with your audience. They tell you what colors, objects, keywords and hashtags inspire your audience to take action.

5. Content deployment

With the recent updates on most social media platforms, knowing what time and on what channel to post is just as important as having the right kind of content. If you’ve ever done a google search for “when’s the best time to post” or “how often should I post,” you’d know that there’s no one-size-fits-all for social media content deployment.

AI scheduling tools like Marketo, Mintent and of course Hootsuite all have specialized tools that help you automatically generate a posting calendar based on audience and industry data. These tools have seen a rise in popularity since the decrease in organic reach on Facebook due to algorithmic changes that prioritize content that is frequently interacted with — a result of well-timed posts, as well as quality content.

Sephi Shapira, CEO of escapex, a company that creates personally owned platforms (POPs) for celebrity influencers who wish to forgo organic reach algorithms by distributing content on their own app, says, “Whenever a centralized social media platform gains enough market share, its relationship with its users changes from collaboration to competition. Facebook, in particular, claims to reduce the reach of brands and creators to maintain its ethos of a family-and-friend-facing platform, but the truth is user data and brand advertisements pay their bills. Considering the declining sentiment towards Facebook and the growing competition in the app landscape, I don’t think forcing brands into paying for reach is a good way to keep them loyal.”   

6. Promotion optimization

Top influencers know that splitting their promotion budget evenly for every post isn’t useful. They use tools like Smart Insights, Clearmob, Data Gran and Marketo to look holistically at what posts are the most effective to boost based on content, timing, competition and audience. These systems intelligently allocate and maximize performance for your budget.

To sum it all up, robust social media analysis, content creation, optimization and promotion require the right tools. Also, there are too many conversations happening every day for you to monitor them all manually.

Executing the right strategy with artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions makes your social media analysis both more powerful and more accurate.