Internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are one of the craziest things we have going on these days. Everybody is talking about it; yet it seems as if nobody really knows what they are talking about it. I don’t know if that statement is fair or not, but leaving all myths and biblical stories aside, one thing that we are pretty sure is that AI, ML and other of these technologies – sooner or later will have a significant effect on our daily lives. They are going to revolutionize the way we perceive and communicate with the world, in addition to that; experts believe that AI will have a significant impact on our way of thinking.
One of the dominant things that will be surely affected by the rise of AI – be its marvels or curse whatever you believe, is social media. Social media is now an integral part of our everyday lives and having a social media account is now as common as having a national security number. So the question that most of the people including consumers, marketers, content creators and all the stakeholders are asking is that how will Artificial Intelligence effect social media?
To be honest, it is a difficult question to answer as it involves a lot of theological data and interpretation of prophecies by the great legends. However, being a digital marketer myself – I keep an eye on the developments as social media is one of my key channels that generate revenue and bring in a lot of sales. So I have tried to pick the pattern as well as the pace of these developments to give you a vague picture of how AI will affect social media marketing and how social media marketers can enhance brand reach capitalizing on these technologies.
1. Visuals
Almost all social media platforms except for a few are visual. Reports reveal that millennial are more into imagery then piles of text. AI-empowered applications and recognition tools will help marketers gather a lot of actionable insights to understand and interpret the shift in user patterns through millions of images posted on social media. Provided the intense amount of images, picture and videos being posted and uploaded every minute, AI will help brands and marketers to create compelling imagery that drives customer attention.
2. Chatbots
The rise of Chabot is one of the greatest marvels of Artificial intelligence. We all already know about Siri – an AI-powered personal assistant that comes with apple products. AI’s integration with social media will help brands develop some cool chat bots and then place it on their social media account to help customers interact with brands in a more personalized way. These A.I. powered chat bots will act like a brands 24×7 customer support assistant. A lot of brands have already deployed chat bots that have the ability to identify customer’s problem and helps customers just like a salesman of any brick and mortar store. In future, AI will further enhance the abilities of chat bots to make them sound more real and natural.
3. Smart Shopping Solutions
Some experts also believe that AI will help social media to grow as a giant marketplace. This means that social media will not just remain a marketing platform but will come out as some ecommerce platforms as well. For instance, WordPress started as a blogging platform, but now you can establish a full-fledged eCommerce store on it. In Addition to that, there are dozens of AI-powered extensions like woocommerce product options that you can add to your store to help your customers make smarter decisions. Who knows it future we might see AI extensions coming up for social media commerce.
4. Building Relationships
Building Relationships – That was how Facebook and MySpace ostensibly began. The purpose of Facebook was to provide everyone with a platform where they can connect with people in a way they have never experienced before. However, over the years, social media has evolved into more of a broadcasting tool not only for companies or individuals; but we also see government agencies now spending on social media.
The latest AI technologies will try to draw the focus back into building relationships – the core purpose of social media. This could be made possible by prioritizing personal posts, and small, intimate connections over external content such as news, memes, and articles. AI will help users to further connect to new people and make new friends by grouping them on the basis of their common interests. Easier ways to connect and share experiences will be the part of changes that AI will make on social media.
5. Enhanced Transparency
The number of people using private applications such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat has officially surpassed the number of people using public social media platforms such as Facebook, Quora or Twitter.
One of the main reasons is that people are losing trust in public social media platforms and are sick and tired of being judged, bullied, scrutinize and harassed. Moreover, people are also concerned about the monopolistic tendencies of companies and corporations, and their abilities to manipulate consumer behaviors.
AI will help social media platforms address these issues and also data-mine the richest source of consumer information to ensure people enjoy a safe, smooth and secure experience. And, of course this presents an incredibly rich opportunity for Facebook to monetize and also provide brands with more marketing opportunities.
Conclusion:
Like I mentioned earlier, AI is going to touch everything we do. It is time for us to begin considering and improvise according to that form of innovation on in our companies as well as daily. For this reason, AI is not going to con, but instead it will slowly and steadily sneak into our lives in hundreds of small ways. Everyday tasks will become fast, integrated and easy to handle.
AI will flourish in today’s age of assistance. Companies will have the opportunity to accentuate themselves by cleverly applying layers of AI to make their customer experience more engaging, exciting and entertaining.
Paul Simmons is eCommerce web developer who works for Extendons, a web design company develop extensions for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento.