How to Use AI in Social Media to Drive Business Growth: 20 Insights and Tips

With social media algorithms favoring high engagement and audiences demanding fresh, personalized content, the pressure to deliver is intense. Hence the AI in social media entrance: not to replace your creativity, but to increase it.

In this blog, we take a look at the top 20 use cases of AI in social media, paired with concrete usage examples for you to get social media content and optimization insights. Let's dive in!

What does AI in social media imply?

AI in social media is all about using artificial intelligence to boost social media strategies and generate better results.

Brands can use AI to run in-depth performance analyses, gain deeper insights into competitors, and pivot their social media strategies when needed.

Plus, AI can crunch data in real time, delivering instant insights into audience behavior.

So, how is AI used in social media? The use cases of AI in social media marketing are plenty–from automated customer support to content curation, AI is reshaping the industry.

Why use AI in social media?

Take a look at some of the many benefits of AI in social media.

Automate tasks

Marketers can use AI to automate repetitive tasks like monitoring brand mentions and automating responses to common customer queries.

The popularity of AI in the social media market has seen an increase in AI tools designed to optimize engagement and content performance.

Enable quicker responses to trends

AI-powered tools monitor brand mentions and sentiment in real time across various social media platforms.

Whenever there are negative comments about your brand, you can get alerts immediately and take appropriate action. Similarly, AI tools can also help identify emerging trends that align with your brand’s identity, allowing you to create timely content and post it while the trend is still hot and popular on social media.

Generate engaging content

AI-based tools turn your ideas into platform-specific content that clicks with your audience. You can generate captions, video scripts, and even animations.

For instance, by using AI, you can quickly generate scripts for your YouTube videos, create catchy visuals for your Instagram posts, or attention-grabbing content for LinkedIn based on your recent whitepapers.

Offer 24/7 customer support

Customer care teams are under constant pressure to respond quickly to complaints and queries, know all the answers, and manage complex workflows. AI chatbots help brands scale support operations without overloading agents or compromising service quality.

Identify patterns in audience behavior

Tools that integrate AI can analyze user data to pinpoint when your followers are most active, what type of content drives the best engagement, and which topics resonate most with them.

Measure campaign success

AI social media tools can monitor campaign metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversion rates–all in real-time. They can also simplify complex attributions, showing you exactly which campaigns and channels are doing the heavy lifting for your ROI.

20 ways to use AI in social media

We’ve outlined 20 key applications of AI in social media and broken them down into seven major categories.

• Content creation: AI generates captions, CTAs, and visuals by analyzing audience trends and market data, helping brands create consistent and personalized content.
• Social media analytics: AI identifies key content pillars, audience behaviors, and competitor strategies, which enables brands to refine their own strategy.
• Social media engagement and customer support: AI chatbots provide instant, 24/7 customer service and automate comment moderation to build memorable experiences and ensure a safe online space.
• Influencer marketing: AI lets you generate your own virtual influencers or identify ideal collaborators by analyzing engagement metrics.
• Advertising and targeting: AI personalizes ads, predicts trends, and optimizes budgets and placements to reduce wasted ad spend.
• Social listening and monitoring: AI analyzes brand mentions and sentiment, predicts trends, and identifies potential PR crises.
• Social media campaign planning and automation: AI schedules posts, suggests optimal timings, and generates campaign ideas using audience insights and historical data.

Now, let’s explore these applications in detail.

Use AI for social media content creation and optimization

#1. Generate content ideas

AI generates fresh content ideas by analyzing competitor strategies, market trends, audience behavior, and your brand’s position. It offers insights into popular topics and content formats that drive the most engagement.

With AI writing tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly, you can generate captions, hooks, CTA, and other text-based content for your social posts. When using these platforms, your prompts should include information about brand voice, audience, and competitors to generate contextually relevant ideas.

For example, Bloomreach, an e-commerce personalization platform, used Jasper’s AI Assistant writing to create content without compromising on quality, which led to a 113% increase in the brand’s blog output and a 40% increase in website traffic.

How amazing is that?

#2. Personalize content

The main AI use in social media is analyzing large amounts of user data to identify audience interests, behaviors, and patterns, enabling the creation of personalized content for different segments.

For example, Starbucks uses AI and predictive analytics to identify purchasing patterns and offer personalized recommendations to its customers. With over 90 million weekly transactions, their vast dataset would be impossible to analyze effectively without AI.

AI platforms can also predict which types of content resonate with specific audience segments by analyzing habits and interactions.

When generating content ideas for various social media platforms, you can import audience data to tailor your content to different social media personas, ensuring maximum engagement.

#3. Create visual content or trim longer videos into short-form

AI lets you create visuals like images, animations, and even branded videos tailored to your unique brand identity.

While AI-powered tools like Canva convert text into images, videos, and templates, Opus Clip cuts long videos into engaging short clips and highlights key moments by analyzing audio, visuals, and user engagement.

AI tools can also add captions or subtitles, making your videos more accessible and saving you a ton of time by eliminating the need to manually transcribe videos and sync text.

But just because generative AI for social media can create visuals doesn't mean they have to be boring or generic. By saving time on production, you can focus more on the creative aspect.

Take Nike's AI-generated ad with Serena Williams, for example. It showcases a video of a tennis match between her younger self from the 1999 Grand Slam and her 2017 Australian Open persona.

Similarly, fashion retailer Mango now features AI-generated glam bots in its advertisements to enable faster content creation. These AI models are not real people. They are just virtual models that help the brand showcase its products.

#4. Optimize your social media SEO

AI can identify high-value and high-intent SEO hashtags relevant to your niche and brand. These platforms can analyze social media posts and comments to find the currently trending hashtags and help marketers select the most engaging hashtags for their campaigns.

How is AI making social media content creation better?

• Improved scalability and efficiency: Generative AI in social media allows marketers to create a high volume of content while still maintaining consistency and quality.

• Save time on brainstorming: Instead of starting from a blank page, you get numerous content ideas that are generated by AI after analyzing viral posts, competitor strategies, and audience preferences.

• Create graphics in seconds: AI tools allow you to generate visually appealing templates, photos, illustrations, and animations that perfectly align with your brand aesthetics.

• Tailor content for every customer segment: One of the most impactful ways to use AI in social media is by identifying customer interests, patterns, and behaviors to generate highly relevant content that connects with different demographics.

• Get more space for creative thinking: Generating an AI image is simple, but deciding what image will make the biggest impact is where the magic happens. AI automates repetitive tasks, giving marketers more time to focus on bold ideas and innovative strategies that drive campaigns forward.

• Expand reach with localization: Use AI to translate content into multiple languages effortlessly, connecting with global customers.

Use AI for social media analytics

#5. Get social media content pillars for any brand

By leveraging that integrated AI analytics, you peek into your competitors' social media strategy and identify their main content pillars by analyzing their content, engagement metrics, and audience interaction.

You can uncover key topics driving the success of your competitors. Better yet, you can spot the gaps they are missing and use them to stand out.

Socialinsider is a social media analytics tool that uses AI to analyze social media content. With its competitive intelligence AI feature, it helps you identify the content pillars of your competitors, allowing you to learn from their success and optimize your social media marketing with AI.

Here’s how you can check your competitors’ content pillars with Socialinsider:

• First things first, add your competitors profiles into Socialinsider.
• Go to a competitor’s profile and click on ‘Content Pillars.’ You’ll see the AI-generated content pillars, along with the number of posts, engagement, and views for each.

And the good news is that the AI content pillars pillars analysis is available also a brand level.

Once you add all the social media profiles for a specific brand, group them into a ‘Brand,’ and analyze the social media performance of those content themes across channels.

Now these are just AI-generated content pillars that are based on the brand’s industry. You also have the option of creating your own custom pillars. To do that, go to any brand profile, click on Content, and scroll down to view all the posts shared by the brand.

Tap on ‘Tag post’ for any post, add your custom content pillar, and click ‘add content pillar.’

#6. Analyze sentiment and emotions of your social media post

AI-driven sentiment analysis involves analyzing user comments and reactions to understand the overall sentiment toward the brand or a particular campaign. AI tools can analyze likes, shares, comments, views, and reactions to determine public sentiment.

For example, sentiment analysis could help a brand assess if a continuously growing conversation around sustainability is a long-term trend. The brand could then create more relevant content that is focused on sustainability.

Netflix uses sentiment analysis to accurately process social media mentions and viewer reviews of its original content. If sentiment analysis reveals that a particular theme or genre is resonating more with the viewers, Netflix would likely invest more in similar productions.

But sentiment analysis isn’t just for large brands like Netflix with massive marketing budgets. Even smaller brands can execute AI-driven sentiment analysis using tools like ChatGPT.  You can upload user comments as a CSV file to ChatGPT and request sentiment and emotion analysis.

#7. Create a social media strategy

AI can take the guesswork out of social media planning by analyzing mountains of data at lightning speed and help you build smart strategies for your brand that deliver tangible results.

Socialinsider's Strategy Assistant GPT can work as your personal strategist, analyzing trends, previous campaign data, and audience behavior to identify the top content pillars for your brand and optimize your strategy with AI social media analytics.

How to access Socialinsider Strategy Assistant GPT:

• Log in to your ChatGPT account, click on Explore GPTs, and get started (a premium subscription is required for custom GPTs).

• Search for Socialinsider and select: Socialinsider Strategy Assistant.

• Start chatting and give as much information as you want to create a compelling social media strategy.

#8. Get trend predictions

AI analyzes past user behavior data to identify patterns and emerging trends in real time. AI identifies trends that help brands predict which topics or content formats are more likely to gain popularity. This enables brands to stay ahead of the curve and respond more quickly to changes.

TikTok uses AI to predict and identify emerging trends on its platform. Its AI marketing tools, like Symphony, use the data to assist marketers in creating content that aligns better with predicted trends, improving reach and engagement.

Ben & Jerry’s used AI to analyze all their existing unstructured data and uncover consumer insights, which revealed a trend: many consumers enjoy ice cream in the morning. This insight inspired the brand to develop a range of breakfast flavors.

#9. Analyze your social media performance

AI analytics platforms can automatically track important engagement metrics such as shares, comments, likes, and click through rates, providing AI insights to make your future campaigns a success.

Analytics apps like Socialinsider create unified dashboards, aggregating data from multiple social channels to simplify social media analysis and enable clear, organized reporting for your team or higher-ups.

How is AI making social media analytics better?

• Deep competitor insights: You can use AI to analyze your competitors’ social media content, their recent performance, and audience metrics. It's like having a backstage pass to all of your competitors’ social media playbooks. Analyze their posting patterns to anticipate their next steps and even find out the topics they overlook.

• Enhance your social media strategy: With AI, you’re not just throwing darts in the dark and hoping one sticks. Instead, AI dives into trends, historical data, and customer behavior to help you craft strategies that hit the bullseye every time.

• Identify opportunities for improvement: AI analytics can reveal what your customers really think about specific product features and their functionality. You can use AI to better align your product development strategy with your customers’ actual needs.

• Benchmarking against your competitors: Apps like Socialinsider help you identify industry benchmarks and measure where your brand stands against them. You can identify the areas where your brand can outperform your competitors and where you’re lacking right now.

Use AI for social media engagement and customer support

#10. Chatbots for customer service

The uses of AI in social media are expanding rapidly, with AI chatbots becoming the new industry standard. These tools can help brands handle customer inquiries, provide instant responses, and resolve common issues 24/7.

When customers want fast service, even during peak hours, AI chatbots can handle the first interaction and eliminate wait times. Even during non-business hours, they can answer queries, set up appointments, share order statuses, and identify which questions require escalation to a support agent.

These chatbots leverage natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand customer requests and improve their responses with each interaction.

Chatbots are supported by all the major social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, and Kik. You can also use chatbots for messaging platforms like WhatsApp to connect with customers.

The data collected through AI chatbots can track customer reactions to responses and enable more personalized and accurate interactions.

Sephora, the beauty retail brand, started using a chatbot to offer beauty advice on Kik back in 2017. The chatbot offered personalized product recommendations to customers and also helped the brand gain valuable insights about its customers.

Tesla uses an AI-powered predictive customer service system that can analyze customer data to predict potential issues with vehicles and proactively reach out to customers before any problems even occur.

#11. Comment moderation

The amount of comments and user-generated content on social media platforms is growing exponentially. For brands, it's important to moderate every piece of content quickly and accurately.

AI-based content moderation works 24/7 to identify and remove spam, hate speech, or inappropriate content automatically. These tools quickly address any comments that violate community guidelines or legal standards, ensuring a safe and positive online environment for your audience.

AI can enhance scalability by handling large volumes of user-generated content, accurately. Unlike human moderators, AI moderation tools eliminate personal bias and adhere strictly to predefined guidelines.

In addition, AI content moderation can prevent legal damages caused by harmful or inappropriate allegations.

#12. Audience interactions

Using AI, social media tools can analyze your past posts, engagement metrics, interaction patterns, and audience time zones to recommend the best times to post for maximum reach.

Socialinsider can take your competitor analysis a step further by letting you peek into your competitor’s posting schedule. You can use the competitor analysis tool to check on what days and times your competitors post the most and use this information to identify patterns in their strategy, such as when they experience the highest engagement.

Beyond timing, AI tools can also automate interactions with your followers by liking content, replying directly to frequently asked questions, and providing instant customer support. You can automate responses based on predefined keywords to ensure consistent interaction with your followers.

How is AI making social media engagement and customer support better?

• 24/7 availability: AI chatbots can provide customers with instant support 24/7 without requiring them to jump through several loops. It reduces wait times while ensuring your customers always get the assistance they need, even when your support agents are unavailable.

• More consistent and empathetic support: If you have a big company, chances are, your customers will rarely talk to the same agent twice. Even with businesses continuously focused on improving their customer service training programs, the level of expertise can vary from agent to agent leading to inconsistencies in support. Chatbots are programmed to offer standardized support and level-headed guidance for each customer, even when the customers are frustrated.

• Scale at speed: AI can handle high volumes of customer requests, comments, and content moderation tasks without compromising on accuracy, speed, or quality. With this scalability, businesses can grow at a steady pace without needing to increase their support staff in the same proportion.

• Deliver omnichannel experience: Your customers are everywhere—email, social media, and messaging apps.  With AI chatbots, you can keep the conversation flowing seamlessly across different channels. Whether your customers are jumping from their laptops to their phones or switching apps, they can pick up right where they left off. No hiccups, no need to provide the same information again—just smooth, uninterrupted support everywhere they go.

Use AI for influencer marketing

#13. Virtual influencers

Did you know you can build your own branded virtual influencers?

Virtual influencers are digital personalities that do not exist outside of social media. These are not real people but virtual characters generated using AI.

They use social media like regular influencers—sharing content, endorsing products, and engaging with followers

Lu do Magalu is a popular virtual influencer with more than 7 million followers on Instagram. She has collaborated with major brands such as MAC, Samsung, and Red Bull.

KFC’s virtual colonel was the first branded virtual influencer on social media. The iconic mascot of the brand was transformed into a virtual personality to connect with Gen Z audiences. The computer-generated influencer took over KFC’s Instagram account for two weeks to collaborate with brands like TurboTax, Old Spice, and Dr Pepper.

The biggest advantage of working with virtual influencers? Your brand can connect with younger, digitally native generations fascinated by innovation and technology.

A report by Gartner predicts that by 2026, CMOs will dedicate over 30% of their influencer marketing budgets to virtual influencers.

How is AI making influencer marketing better?

• Use AI for influencer discovery: AI can help identify influencers who align perfectly with your brand's values and target audience. By analyzing factors like demographics, growth rate, brand mentions, interests, and authenticity, AI ensures you find the ideal match for your campaigns.

• Predict any influencer’s future performance: AI analyzes past data to predict the potential success of an influencer campaign. This reduces trial and error and helps you save on your marketing budget by avoiding influencers who are less likely to deliver results.

• More creative control with virtual influencers: You get full creative control over the appearance, personality, and actions of virtual influencers to make sure they completely align with your brand values.

• Reduced costs: Yes, creating virtual influencers can require upfront costs, but it's a cost-effective marketing tool in the long run. Virtual influencers don’t require any ongoing fees, contracts, or commissions. Their creatives can be reused across multiple campaigns, and you can adapt them instantly to any creative direction.

Use AI for advertising and targeting

#14. Targeted ad campaigns

Marketers can use AI predictive analytics to measure the possibility of a user clicking on an ad and create more targeted ad campaigns. AI optimizes ad placement and content to reach the right audience based on browsing history, interests, and behavior.

You can also run multiple ad variations using AI to identify which combinations of taglines, images, and CTA work the best for different customer segments.

#15. Dynamic content for ads

AI can create hyper-personalized ads after analyzing browsing behavior, demographics, preferences, and purchase history.

Content can be modified in real time depending on the user’s current context, like their current location, device, and time of day.

For example, if a customer segment frequently searches for productivity tools in the late afternoon, AI can serve them personalized ads at that time, offering a free trial. The ad can be adjusted in real time to highlight features tailored to each segment—freelancers might see ads focused on task management, while team leaders would be shown ads highlighting collaboration tools."

Vanguard, a global investment firm, uses AI to deliver highly personalized ads at scale, all while operating in the heavily regulated financial industry where staying compliant is paramount. Using AI tools, Vanguard has been able to increase conversions by 15%.

#16. Budget optimization

Analyzing massive datasets of past campaigns, AI can predict future performance across multiple channels, leading to more accurate bid optimization.

AI algorithms can adjust bids for ad placements or keywords and even reallocate the budget towards high-performing audience segments and campaigns.

When the algorithms are refined enough, you can also let AI completely manage ad performance and build an optimized budget.

How is AI making advertising and targeting better?

• Improved audience targeting: AI collects data on user behavior, interests, and browsing history to deliver the right ads to the right audience, boosting engagement and relevance

• Efficient ad creation: Depending on your campaign requirements and target audience, AI can generate ad copy, visual graphics, and multiple ad variations. This adaptability allows marketers to test and refine strategies quickly and maximize their social media ROI.

• Move budgets to the right places: AI can redistribute budgets in real time towards high-performing ads to ensure optimal use of resources and reduce wasted ad spend in low-performing campaigns.

Use AI for social listening and monitoring

#17. Brand monitoring

AI isn’t just about crunching numbers to find the right ratios and percentages. It can also help you analyze online customer reviews, feedback, and Reddit threads to get the answer to all the ‘why’ behind customer decisions.

Brand monitoring gives you insights into customer behavior, enabling you to improve your brand messaging and refine your marketing strategies to better connect with your target audience

AI can gather all brand mentions to perform sentiment analysis and assess the tone of your brand's mentions—whether positive, negative, or neutral. This can give you real-time information about what customers feel about your products and campaigns.

#18. Crisis management

AI can continuously monitor brand mentions even when your team isn't in the office and alert them when negative sentiments spike or a negative story surfaces suddenly.

Early detection can help you intervene quickly and take preventative steps before a single negative comment snowballs into a full-blown crisis. In addition, AI can analyze historical data and current trends to perform predictive analytics and help you anticipate a crisis even before it occurs.

How is AI making social listening and monitoring better?

• Collect real time data across multiple platforms: AI makes it easy to collect data from multiple sources, all in real time, so you never have to worry about missing important mentions on any part of the web. This, in turn, gives an in-depth view of your brand’s online presence and how people perceive it.

• Use advanced AI filtering: AI uses filters to differentiate relevant brand mentions from irrelevant ones and reduce noise to provide you with the most accurate data. You can also set up custom filters to identify specific sentiments or specific topics.

• Create memorable customer experiences: Brand monitoring allows you to surprise customers and build memorable experiences that boost long-term brand loyalty. You get to dig into user conversations to find out what your customers are saying about your brand and surprise them with personalized offers like vouchers or exclusive event invites.

Use AI for campaign planning and automation

#19. Content scheduling

AI platforms can analyze the engagement patterns of your target audience to recommend the best posting times.

For instance, AI might be able to reveal that your posts get the most views around 3-4 pm, allowing you to schedule your content when a big chunk of your audience is active.

Scheduling posts also ensures your content is always shared at a fixed time and posts never get missed, even when team members are busy or on leave.

#20. Campaign ideation

Even in the world of AI, there’s no replacement for the creative human brains. AI can’t match the empathy, innovative thinking, and subtlety of humans–at least not yet.

Instead, here’s what AI can do: It can look at past campaign data to suggest what your creative campaigns should achieve, who you should be speaking to through the campaigns, and how to best address them. AI tools can even suggest campaign ideas based on the current trending topics on social media.

You could go further and feed customer success stories or recent reports to AI, which can summarize the information and help your team generate unexpected ideas.

How is AI making campaign planning and automation better?

• Event-specific planning: AI enables you to plan and schedule event-specific or seasonal campaigns in advance with relevant and timely content.

• Batch scheduling: Most AI content scheduling tools offer batch scheduling too. That means you can line up a whole bunch of posts in one go and then kick back (or dive into your creative zone) without stressing over daily uploads. It’s like meal-prepping for your content—plan it, set it, and forget it.

• Save tons of time in the ideation phase: Automating the boring part of the creative process allows marketers to focus more on humanizing the AI-generated ideas and ensuring the campaigns can connect with customers on an emotional level.

• Optimized audience engagement: AI analyzes engagement metrics, user behavior, and competitor strategies to determine the best times to post and the most effective content types. This maximizes visibility and boosts interaction rates across the board.

Final thoughts

AI can accelerate and refine your social media strategies with fast content creation, real-time insights, and personalized audience targeting.

By using AI, you can automate tasks, predict emerging trends, and analyze performance across different channels.

To stay ahead of the competition and create content at scale, embrace AI-powered apps like Socialinsider that can offer in-depth analytics and help optimize your social media strategies.

FAQs on AI in social media

What are the advantages and disadvantages of AI in social media?

The main advantages of AI in social media include automating tasks like performance tracking, content creation, content scheduling, and customer support. AI can analyze large amounts of data together to predict trends and optimize your current content to improve ROI.

Of course, overreliance on AI can lead to a lack of a human touch in your social media content. Additionally, if you’re not feeding the AI tools data that is highly relevant to your brand, then you will end up with generic AI content that’s too similar to your competitors and doesn’t make your brand stand out.

Before incorporating AI in your marketing strategy, make sure to weigh all the pros and cons of AI in social media.