How to Use Artificial Intelligence Responsibly in Social Media Marketing Strategies
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been around for quite some time. But recent headlines about the technology have some people questioning how it should be used and when.
This recent news includes Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Google’s Bard, and ChatGPT. This technology has everyone from one journalist concerned about fake news to teachers worried about plagiarism. The concern about AI written text led one college student to create an app that can tell if AI wrote an essay.
So the question is, is it ethical to use AI in social media marketing? And if so, how do you use it responsibly?
To answer these questions, let’s first look at the recent past and how AI has already shaped social media marketing.
Diving Into the Technological Past
We’ve already been using AI in social media for some time, however, the technology of AI keeps advancing and evolving. The chatbot has existed online for some time and people have generally been comfortable with them, knowing that if the chatbot couldn’t answer their question, they would be directed to a human customer service agent who could assist them. Many businesses have set up auto reply and chatbots on Facebook Messenger, for example.
Other examples include TikTok’s AI function used to translate text to speech to allow for voice overs with a computer generated voice. The good old algorithms that give personalized recommendations are AI too. These machine learning forms of AI analyze user data to deliver content that relates to a user’s specific interests.
AI Technology in the Present
Newer technology that uses AI includes sentiment analysis. This is the process of using AI to analyze social media data to determine the sentiment behind it. In other words, it helps you monitor how people feel about your brand or a product of yours. It allows you to better understand the conversations happening online around your brand and can help you respond accordingly.
Chatbot technology has evolved to be more and more human-like. This can be a double edged sword. It can provide personalized, human-like interactions, but it can also seem too real, like when Bing Chat expressed love for the person it was interacting with. This can be unsettling, but it’s important to remember that this type of AI scours its connections, like the Internet, for information and it is only reflecting what it finds through those connections.
Certain scheduling platforms are also experimenting with AI generated copy. AI algorithms analyze data such as past performance of certain content and generate copy based on the information it analyzes.
What Does This All Mean?
So is it possible to use AI responsibly in digital marketing? The answer to this question is yes. AI doesn’t function in a vacuum. It can elevate your social media marketing strategy, but can never fully replace human social marketers and managers.
Here is what AI can do in digital marketing:
- Give you better information about your target audience
- Help you develop more informed content
- Start interactions with users
But what AI cannot do is think creatively or come up with new ideas. In other words, AI only provides suggestions based on past performance and content that is already out there. However, it is up to the human marketing professional to decide which direction to take.
It is this human decision where you get to decide what is responsible use of AI in the digital marketing sphere. How “responsible use” is defined will be different for each brand. So stick to your brand’s morals and values when deciding how to use AI in your social media marketing strategy.