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Should Bots be a Part of Your Social Media Marketing – Why the Answer Might Surprise You

Should Bots be a Part of Your Social Media Marketing – Why the Answer Might Surprise You

AI bots exist all over social media, helping brands spread their message through automated means. These bots have not only helped brands promote but they have also allowed for better customer service, improved brand-customer interactions, and less necessity for human intervention.

Social media bots are still a controversial subject. Some see them as meaningless spam. Then, others couldn’t do without them. Bots are accounts that are automated and controlled by coding. Social media bots are essentially algorithms that use AI to automate responses, carry conversations, and build relationships. You make the code, set up the account, and let it run.

In social media marketing, bots are used to answer or send direct messaging, to help humans locate information online, like posts on your behalf, and/or can follow users on your behalf. They can be used to help grow audiences and have done so effectively in the past decade, on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere.

The ultimate purpose of social media bots and AI isn’t to replace humans. It’s to support your brand’s growth by connecting customers with the answers to the questions faster and more efficiently. Social bots are used every day by organizations in health, finance, retail, travel, and entertainment. Some consumers don’t like bots. They find them annoying, meaningless and are turned off by them. Regardless of what one may think about them, from a consumer or brand perspective, they’re already being used successfully to power several benefits.

The advantages of social media bots are that they can be programmed to act as customer service agents, they can answer simple questions, they can be used to deliver content, they can send personalized messages, they can send order notifications, they can help with real-time analytics, they can collect information from consumers, and social media bots can also help increase sales when done right. Although we call them ‘social media bots’, they can also be applied in email marketing and on your website.

Now let’s be clear in saying that things can go wrong with a bot. There are risks. If your bot is automatically following users or re-tweeting messages tagged, the bots don’t understand the context and thereby, they could be promoting something you don’t want to promote. They can unknowingly promote something that doesn’t reflect your personal views or your brand’s positioning. This could mean damage to your credibility or reputation. They can also inflate follower counts on social media, skewing marketing data a bit.

There are companies using social media bots and AI for good. Vodafone has a question-answering social media bot ready to refer a user to a human operator if they have questions unanswered after an interaction. SnapTravel has an AI helping users find hotel deals based on budget, destination, and date. Lyft chatbots allow a user to request a ride from anywhere. There are so many other companies using artificial intelligence in digital marketing. Even at a basic level, they can provide significant value.

Join us in strengthening your brand on social media, email, and on your website. Contact Unlimited Exposure today. You don’t need to know how to code or how to do anything fancy. We’ll help set up everything, ensuring you receive customized AI support to make more sales, leads, conversions, and success, success, success!