Automated social media posts | AI in business #18

Is today’s artificial intelligence competent enough to handle social media content optimization? Can we expect the selection of excerpts from broader company materials and the creation of social media-appropriate posts from them, i.e. effective content repurposing, to become the domain of artificial intelligence? Curious to find out? Read on about automated social media posts!

Automated social media posts – table of contents:

1. Automated social media posts – introduction
2. The role of AI in creating content for social media
3. What does artificial intelligence need?
4. What can we automate with AI?
5. Automated social media posts – summary

Automated social media posts – introduction

In our previous article, we wrote about how artificial intelligence is making it easier to create a publication calendar and optimize the frequency of social media posts. Today, we’d like to take a look at the newest cutting-edge innovations in that field. In other words, we’ll see how AI can create posts that appeal to targeted viewers’ tastes so they eagerly display as well as share them. By what means then can artificial intelligence design optimized content for a specific platform?

The role of AI in creating content for social media

Modern artificial intelligence is not yet capable of creating longer content on its own. It requires prompting it with precise questions so it can formulate responses through paraphrasing available material. This way it generates coherent sentences, even whole paragraphs. All that under one condition: the source input provided to the artificial intelligence must contain enough information directly relevant to the topic in question to create meaningful statements. We will devote a separate article covering the formation of new texts with the help of artificial intelligence.

Applying snippets and optimizing them for another distribution channel is most often referred to as repurposing. That’s why today we will focus on the already available and increasingly popular technology by which AI creates automated social media posts with snippets created by specialists of longer corporate content, like for instance:

• blog posts
• videos
• podcasts
• reports
• case studies

What does artificial intelligence need?

The automation of the publication calendar clears a path for selecting the optimal time and date for an entry to appear on social media platforms. However, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are not limited to scheduling. AI can also facilitate picking the right content that will interest your company’s customers and clients.

With human-generated materials, the task of artificial intelligence is to suggest optimal content distribution as well as automatically adjust it to match the specifics of each media platform. Therefore, it requires the following answers:

• What? – refers to the selection of appropriate audio or visual material
• To whom? – deals with deciding whether the content is to show up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the company’s TikTok; but also whether to share the message with all audiences or only a properly defined segment
• When? – concerns scheduling entries, a matter managed through optimizing the publication calendar with AI,
• How? – defines the choice of the appropriate publication channel – the artificial intelligence may decide, for example, that a company event can be told about through a story on Instagram, but it is better not to devote a series of Tweets to it.

For AI to generate effective and persuasive content for our audience, it has to learn the expectations of the target audience of our social media profiles in the first place. Hence, the AI requires:

• time to learn (Machine Learning, ML)
• access to the publication history
• an extensive analytical module powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies.

This will enable artificial intelligence to analyze the previous posts and reactions of observers and suggest what courses of action and communication to take in a given situation. However, keep in mind that at the current stage of AI development we cannot expect plain, unambiguous as well as straightforward answers or solutions. It is also doubtful whether it will happen at all.

What can we automate with AI?

Today’s automation of social media posts is all about effective content repurposing. Therefore, it allows you to:

• reuse existing content and adapt it to the requirements of publishing on other social media
• optimize entries for SEO – so that the best keywords will be used in them and the texts will be more easily searchable
• automatically find “guiding threads” – elements that connect larger amounts of corporate content to make it more coherent and organized, as well as create guidelines for creating new materials
• generate new posts linking to predetermined pages or documents – multi-platform use of links is a huge time saver, but it is still sometimes one of the more difficult challenges for automating content publishing
• reply to customer inquiries in real-time – thanks to chatbots and voicebots

With multi-platform automation, the company also gains access to posts from all social media platforms in one place. This not only allows you to compare the content of all posts but also to draw aggregate statistics for all social media. With these, it is possible to determine whether a campaign in a particular medium was successful by, for instance, identifying more precisely the customer segment it reached.

There are other exciting but less popular AI-based automation capabilities. For example:

• use of filters on photos to make the company’s image materials more consistent
• standardization of audio materials
• automatic selection of colors – highlights, fonts, and backgrounds of entries according to the results of previous analyses

Automated social media posts – summary

Automating the creation and repurposing of content in social media posts is one of the most rapidly growing areas of applying artificial intelligence. First, it’s an unprecedented time-saver that provides access to multi-faceted statistics for companies to optimize and shape their social media presence strategies. Though the days of autonomous AI are way ahead, we can already benefit from the tremendous advantages associated with its application.

If you like our content, join our busy bees community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest.