Running your social media presence is often very hectic and takes up a lot of time. With high volumes of incoming mentions, companies can’t see the forest for the trees and fail to be productive in a tough working environment. Instead of getting lost in the stream of incoming social media mentions, you are desperately looking for crucial shortcuts or best practices that can help improve your efficiency, and ultimately save time and money.

Although many companies are often extremely motivated to take great care of their customers, they often lack the right tools or support system to put their ideas into practice and provide exceptional customer service to every single customer. In urgent cases, especially when dealing with angry customers or in emergency situations, they’re missing out on important opportunities to acquire and retain customers.

Luckily, there’s a huge surge in AI-driven tools that change how marketers are using social media and integrate it better with the whole company.

1. Use AI to compose social media messages

I don’t like automating social media communications, so this is not about that.

This is about generating original replies which you (or your team member) can then edit, personalize and post. Social GPT is one example of AI-driven tools that can increase your productivity by suggesting well-crafted responses based on your preferred tone:

Another tool that can help you write your updates (especially for long-form networks like Quora and Linkedin) is Text Optimizer which uses AI to create semantically relevant content based on any question you ask:

According to branding stats, your customer needs to see (and engage with) your brand at least 5-7 times to remember you, so participating in relevant discussions is key to building a recognizable brand. AI tools that help you write messages and captions will help this job doable!

2. Delegate and integrate

Divide and conquer.

On any social media team, it’s important to make clear distinctions between multiple functions and give essential responsibilities to the right people. Too often, companies are fixated on the amount of money it will cost to train and coach employees. However, empowering them and investing in crucial resources will hugely increase efficiency.

The more you can empower your digital marketing team with straightforward social media guidelines, the more your efforts will pay off. Tweethunter.io is an AI-driven tool allowing you to delegate Twitter content creation to your team members who can also use AI ideation and writing tools to write and schedule engaging tweets.

Flick is another tool with AI-driven delegation features allowing your team members to access various AI tools to create and schedule social media updates.

Delegating responsibilities refers to the role people take on when providing support to your team, and it refers to assigning internal specialists/experts as well. If you’re dealing with a huge number of different questions on a daily basis, getting the right reply to those messages means directing them to the right people and, often, to the right department.

Don’t be afraid to involve other teams. Social is, by all means, not a one-man job managed by a single department. Involve everyone, but make sure you manage this process easily by appointing at least one social-media-savvy person from every department as the main point of contact on multiple important topics.

Do make sure to include your customer support team in your social listening strategy! They will do a much better job helping your customers online than anyone in the industry. And that experience will also help them scale their job more meaningfully. Knowing what customers ask online or how they discuss your problems will help them set up automated workflows (using technology like chatbots or IVR) to segment customers and help them quicker effectively.

3. Automate (with Caution)

Social media tools obviously make you more efficient. Therefore, with the automation integrated into these tools, you can save your staff hours of time each day. They enable you to connect easily with your audience – beyond what you thought was possible.

AI makes it easy to automate specific tasks (like discovery and delegation).

Don’t get me wrong; automation should never be used by default to engage with your customers. Engaging with your customers means communicating with them in the same language on just one specific topic. For certain situations or typical incoming questions (such as, “Where can I access my personal account?”), canned responses with important links prove to be very successful to manage the workload.

But make sure you and your team prioritize human connection above all. Sure you can get AI help for brainstorming and even writing your posts (as well as creating social media images and videos), but don’t automatically post anything. Review what’s generated for you, make edits, and personalize!

AI is really helpful for keeping your brand-driven channels and assets secure. As Hari Ravichandran put it, being proactive with data security is the smartest decision you can make. AI-driven apps can protect your company’s data by analyzing risks and predicting threats so that you can take necessary measures.

Figure out what works and what doesn’t. Social media isn’t an exact science; it’s a continuous trial-and-error process of going back and forth. AI makes it doable: Don’t lose track of the essence of your brand, and never let a single customer slip through the cracks.

Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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