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From scaling engagement to ad targeting, AI is changing the way influencers and brands create social media content and connect with customers.
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Using artificial intelligence (AI) to sharpen social media marketing strategies isn’t new—companies have been using AI-powered content recommendations and ad targeting since the early 2000s. But the arrival of more advanced AI tools is having an undeniable impact on how brands use social media: 66% of marketers say that AI has improved their influencer marketing campaigns, while 63% reported an increase in revenue.
Since their introduction, AI applications in social media have evolved to include advanced analytics, logo recognition, and, most notably, content creation at unprecedented scale. Experts project that by 2026, roughly half of all social media posts by businesses will be generated by AI. But James Nord, founder of Fohr, an influencer marketing platform, doesn’t see AI as a replacement for human creativity; he sees it as a tool to enhance it.
“We gave everyone in the world a camera [in their smartphones], but there’s really only a small number of people who can use that tool to tell interesting stories that are worth consuming—AI is the same.” The key for brands, James emphasizes, is connecting with your audience through storytelling. Read on to learn how to unlock the ROI of AI social media tools while fostering an authentic connection with your audience.
As both analytical and generative AI tools have evolved, their capabilities are redefining what’s possible in social media marketing and content creation. But just because these capabilities are trending now doesn’t mean they have staying power.
Emerging uses for AI in social media include:
AI can analyze vast amounts of data and produce insights more quickly than previous technology, enabling brands to analyze user behavior in more nuanced ways.
Here’s an example. Knowing when and how to post—a foundational element of social media strategies—is no longer a matter of guesswork. AI can track user behavior and engagement patterns to pinpoint the highest-performing content and recommend the optimal times to publish social media posts, thereby increasing visibility and audience engagement.
At Fohr, James and his team take this a step further, using AI to analyze content and audience sentiment at scale. Within their proprietary influencer marketing app, James’s team uses AI to categorize their creators’ content (e.g., travel, parenting, outdoor, fashion), identify the highest-performing creators within a specific category at any given moment, and report emerging trends to clients.
“If you look across, say, 50 influencers’ posts, you might be able to say, ‘When your face is in it, it does 20% better, but when it’s just a photo of a landscape, it doesn’t do as well,” James says. “AI can help you understand what seems to be working across all these different people and these tens of thousands of posts.”
But he also emphasizes the importance of achieving statistical significance with a big, diverse data set, and cautions creators and strategists from overanalyzing their feed on an individual level. “A lot of creators only post in-feed maybe 10 times a month,” James explains. “There are too many variables to be able to pinpoint exactly what’s happening. Ultimately, it would give you more false positives than insights.”
Thanks to tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, influencers, brands, and social media teams can generate content in seconds. These AI-generated images, which can be further improved with automated editing tools and filters (like what’s available with Shopify Magic) are often used for branded social media posts, ad creatives, and product mockups.
Heinz gained notoriety for an early expression of AI-supported creativity when it asked DALL-E 2 to generate images of ketchup. This reimagining of its human-centered “Draw Ketchup” campaign, which asked customers to draw the condiment from memory in 2021, yielded a collage of Heinz-esque visuals that it used in print and social media ads.
In addition to expanding a creator’s abilities to produce digital art, image generation tools can expedite performance insights by allowing brands to generate and split test multiple versions of content almost instantaneously.
Brands are also capturing cost savings by using AI to augment creative output for campaigns. For example, digital content agency Shuttlerock revealed its AI-enabled creative process for a Pinterest campaign for Corona Extra. Repurposing existing brand assets and adding AI-generated images allowed the agency (and the brand) to do more with less time and money.
While AI-assisted creativity can drive conversation or cost savings, James emphasizes the importance of human creative direction, point of view, and audience connection for success on social. “If a creator is using AI to supplement their workflow, what you’re paying for is still the community and the viewpoint,” he says. “Creators are still the ones directing it; they’re just using a different tool instead of using a camera. So actually, it doesn’t change the fundamental basics of the space.”
Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can help brands write captions, ads, and campaign headlines faster than previously possible. AI tools aim to create content that’s optimized for tone, sentiment, and keyword usage, and most can be trained to mimic your writing style.
Much like image generation, AI text generation works best when it’s used to make writing more efficient, not as a replacement for utilizing your unique voice. One way to inject creativity into AI-generated text is to repurpose your long-form content, such as blogs, podcasts, and books. Tools like OwlyWriter AI by Hootsuite, Feedhive, and Spiral automate the process of repurposing long-form content into social media content that’s optimized for various social channels.
Ultimately, AI-generated captions and content enable businesses to manage more accounts, campaigns, and content streams without increasing their headcount. With AI tools for social media management, even small teams can effectively scale their marketing efforts. A recent McKinsey report shows that 37% of companies using AI in their marketing efforts saw a decrease in marketing costs of up to 19%.
One of the most headline-grabbing AI trends is the rise of AI-generated virtual influencers like Shudu, Miquela, and Imma, which have partnered with notable brands such as Fenty, Prada, and TEDx, respectively (with mixed reviews). In addition to deeper control over messaging, brands can save a significant amount of money by working with AI influencers—a report by Harvard Business Review reveals that, while celebrity partnerships can cost up to $250,000 per post, a post with one of the most popular AI influencers costs only $9,000.
But James is skeptical of the potential to build enduring brands with AI-generated influencers, because he believes it’s out of step with the reason why people spend time on social media in the first place. “If, all of a sudden, we started spending our time looking at content from people who don’t exist,” he elaborates, “that would signal a fundamental shift in what we desire as humans: connection with other people.”
Human influencers are also using AI to scale their reach and engagement via chatbots that interact with fans on their behalf. These bots can mimic influencer voice and tone to engage across comments, tagged mentions, and direct messages. Combined with AI-powered social listening, brands or influencers can respond to audience members around the clock.
Chatbots like these bring up important questions about disclosure, so that users can understand when they are chatting with a bot versus a human. James also questions if influencers actually want to automate user engagement with their fans.
“If you talk to most creators about their DMs,” James says, “there are plenty of people who say, ‘I bought this thing you suggested, thanks!’ But there are also people who say something like ‘I moved to New York because of you, or you helped me through a really hard time in my life.’ I don’t think people want to have that kind of parasocial relationship with a machine.”
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As AI becomes increasingly embedded in social media, its long-term impact remains unclear. “AI is going to be a huge part of social, but I think in some ways it’s going to be more and less impactful than people think,” James predicts. “The ethical side of [using AI in social media] will be a big part of the conversation.”
The conversation surrounding AI on social media raises complex ethical questions that brands cannot ignore. From deepfakes to data privacy, the social media tools that enable creativity and efficiency blur lines around trust and transparency. “This will be a complex [problem] for the platforms to figure out,” says James.
AI thrives on data, but without proper safeguards, it can cross ethical lines in how it collects and uses customer data, potentially violating data privacy laws and norms. The FTC recently reported that large social media companies, such as ByteDance and Meta, gather substantial amounts of user data without providing insight into how it’s used by their artificial intelligence systems and social media platforms.
AI-generated content can blur the line between fact and fiction. Deepfakes and synthetic media (content created or modified by AI) challenge the authenticity of user-generated content, raising concerns about the transparency of online information. AI-generated avatars based on the likeness of influencers or paid actors further blurs the line between user-generated content and ads.
Deepfakes, identified as a key global risk in 2024, are on the rise; they increased by 550% between 2019 and 2023, according to a Deloitte report. This proliferation has been fueled by wide access to generative AI tools, which have made it easier for bad actors to scale deepfake content and spread misinformation.
AI reflects the biases inherent in the data it is trained on. That means that automated community moderation or content generation can inadvertently reinforce harmful stereotypes or exclude marginalized voices. For example, a study conducted by the Pulitzer Center found that AI algorithms embed harmful stereotypes about women into social media platforms.
In some cases, though, AI’s bias can be harnessed for good. The Human Rights Research Center reports that AI can be a powerful tool for detecting and moderating hate speech, flagging misinformation, and identifying human rights issues on social media platforms.
Brands and influencers can use AI to enhance their social media marketing strategies in numerous ways. These include analyzing audience behavior data, optimizing content performance, automating engagement, and generating content and images.
While the future of AI in social media is in flux, it will likely help creators with personalizing content at scale, identifying emerging trends, and generating branded visuals and copy.
Overreliance on AI in social media can lead to the production of inauthentic content and a decline in trust. There are also some ethical concerns surrounding transparency and data usage.
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