AI And Social Media – Automate To Liberate

These days everyone is on social media, for good or for bad.

Sometimes we wish we were not – €Šthe din of the internet is even more acute on social media – Šbut brands need to be where people gather to be successful. Beside the trolling and endless unpleasantness of Twitter exchanges, it’s undeniable one can connect with a lot of people at once on social media.

Here’s the rub: social media is noisy, and getting noisier. How can one be effective on social media when every second more than 8000 tweets are shared? Welcome to the new Alice’s rabbit hole.

If there must be a respite, for both the sake of sanity as well as strategy, we need new tools.

Enter automation. Specifically AI-driven automation. Why AI? Classic automation is a Mechanical Turk. Not the Amazon type, but the 19th-century type. You can believe it can “play chess,” but it doesn’t. It can make the hamster wheel work by itself, but it either needs a lot of personal supervision or it won’t get you very far. It is the epitome of activity with no progress. Unless you are OK with a very repetitive Facebook or Twitter channel. Ever tried a Twitter autoresponder? If so, you’ll be familiar with the idea.

Why can AI make a difference? AI adds a high degree of discernment to automation. I don’t use the word “intelligence” intentionally to avoid the hype and puffery surrounding much of the current chatter around AI these days. 2018 AI won’t be able to write your creative copy (unless you like wacky prose). It will also not be able to create your social strategy, but it will make most repetitive tasks easier and “smarter.”

Let’s review a few areas of social media you can automate using AI:

• • Sourcing fresh content that matches your brand.
  • Following user conversations and reporting important trends.
  • Discovering patterns and events in customer messages and activities.
  • Detecting bots among your Twitter fans.
  • Measuring the sentiment of messages, posts, threads, even your own stream.
  • Looking for images trends and patterns on your Instagram stream.
  • Predicting the results of an ad campaign on Facebook.
  • Managing your calendar and adjusting sharing to match your fans’ daily cycles.

The point of AI automation is not to walk away from your social media channels and leave them to the bots. The social media Westworld is not here yet (no risk the hosts will raise against you). You as a social media expert are very much needed. In fact, human creativity is enhanced by AI, not depressed by it.

Yes, the point is to free-up teams and individuals so they can focus on high-level strategy, big picture, and creative thinking. AI – €Što paraphrase Jobs – €Šis the “new bicycle for our minds”. After all, the key to Damien Hirst’s immense artistic productivity is a workshop approach to art production. The model here is the same: automate to liberate, make room for high-class problem-solving.

I will be writing more on the subject in the coming days and weeks, so follow my profile and leave an applause or two if you enjoyed the post.