Here Are the Benefits Social Media Marketers Are Seeing from Their Use of AI

May 15, 2023

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Business of Marketing | Customer-Centric | Data-driven | Digital | Innovation | Social Media

Artificial intelligence (AI) – while being used by marketers for some years now – has seen an explosion in interest in recent months, driven in part by the release and surge in adoption of ChatGPT. As companies and vendors rush to incorporate AI tools into their initiatives and offerings, 71% of social media marketers surveyed by Sprout Social report having integrated AI and machine learning (ML) tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 into their social media workflows.

Among this group of marketers, an impressive 82% said that adding AI and ML technology to social media workflows has driven positive outcomes or results for them.

The most common benefit observed from implementation of these technologies is improved productivity in social media management tasks, as cited by 61% of respondents. This is also the top result that respondents hope that these technologies can provide, suggesting that they are indeed deriving value from the integration of the tools.

Meanwhile, almost half report more accurate targeting of social media content to specific audiences (49%) and a faster content curation process (47%), with these again aligning with the hopes that marketers separately expressed for AI and ML technology use.

For the time being, fewer say that their use of AI and ML has resulted in decreased spending on paid social (15%) or an increased pipeline of customers (12%) but these are also not the results that marketers are hoping to derive from the use of these tools.

As for those marketers that are yet to integrate AI and ML tools into their social media workflows, just 5% said they don’t anticipate using them. The majority (55%) expect to include the technologies within the next 6 months, and about 8 in 10 within the coming year.

Widening the outlook to the entire social media marketer sample, the report reveals that respondents believe the most useful application of AI and ML technology to be ad targeting (targeting ads more effectively to improve engagement metrics), with 69% placing this among their 5 most useful applications of the technologies. Notably, improved targeting is one of the main benefits that social media marketers are already noticing from their integration of these tools.

Beyond ad targeting, the marketers surveyed also see the value of using these technologies for content creation (such as creating social posts for various platforms; 53% placing in top 5), performance analytics (i.e. tracking and analyzing performance metrics; 53%), content scheduling (i.e. optimizing posting schedule by analyzing user data; 47%), and growing audiences (i.e. by using AI to identify growth opportunities; 46%).

Looking ahead, the main next steps that teams will pursue regarding AI and ML will be to research their potential use cases, train current team members on their use, begin testing them, and continue implementing them into their workflows.

For more, check out the report here.

About the Data: The results are based on a March survey of 255 social media marketers at Manager-level or above, two-thirds of whom work at companies with at least 50 employees.

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