AI is transforming how brands use social media through tools that make connecting with audiences easier and more effective. From suggesting content and scheduling posts to improving ads, AI marketing tools help marketing teams save time and get better results. Teams can share timely, engaging posts, stay ahead of the competition by fine-tuning strategies and make quicker, smarter decisions using real-time data.
In this article, we break down how AI is reshaping social media and marketing. We also explore 16 AI social media tools that help social teams excel.
How AI is transforming social media right now
AI and automation are revolutionizing how social teams work today. Teams can research, create, edit and optimize content to make it more engaging based on content performance metrics and industry insights. They can automate publishing, choose the best times to post on social media and optimize ads using AI-enabled dynamic ad builders, without missing a beat. Not to mention AI tools that help create, edit and enhance videos that help save tons of time and effort.
AI social media tools also help social teams connect quickly and meaningfully with their audiences. Algorithms enable teams to respond to requests more efficiently, prioritizing hundreds of social messages based on content and context in minutes. This goes a long way in building brand satisfaction and loyalty, given that 69% of consumers want responses within 24 hours, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index ™.
Brands can understand their competition better through AI, helping them cut through the noise quickly and pivot strategies when needed to differentiate themselves. They can also find out how consumers feel about their brand, identify emerging trends and make smarter, proactive product and marketing decisions—all based on real-time AI-enabled social analytics data.
Future of AI social media
AI social media marketing is set to make the social experience for users more personalized and immersive, changing how we connect and interact online. Expect content, ads and interactive elements like augmented and virtual reality to become more customized, thanks to machine learning (ML) algorithms that understand how users interact with social content.
Deep learning and neural networks will enable AI to adapt more swiftly to users’ evolving interests. This will help brands create personalized social media experiences, keeping pace with changing consumer preferences and fostering deeper brand and community connections.
AI will also be critical in addressing online harm through advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. These algorithms will help brands find harmful content quickly and moderate it more efficiently. They’ll also help platforms respond faster to issues like harassment or the spread of misinformation.
As these AI technologies evolve, they’ll create safer, more positive social media environments for all users to create closer connections with brands and each other.
8 tips for successfully using AI for social media marketing
Here are eight practical tips for using AI for social media marketing to make your efforts more impactful.
Take advantage of AI-powered social listening
AI-powered social listening tools use ML and NLP to analyze data from social media platforms, forums like Reddit and review websites like Trustpilot to give you deeper brand and customer insights. These include evolving consumer needs, user behavior, peak engagement times and trending topics.
You can even dig deeper for specific information based on your goals and objectives. For example, Sprout’s Recommend by AI Assist generates effective keyword suggestions for Listening topics that enable you to capture the right audience insights from a sea of social listening data related to your brand.
Use these insights to fine-tune your marketing and content strategy. Plus, share them with the broader organization with product development, research and customer care teams to improve your business strategy.
Create and manage social content and curation
Use AI social media tools to streamline your workflow and generate ideas to provide value to your audience while keeping your brand in the conversation. From writing captions to designing graphics, AI tools can help you curate and manage relevant content across social platforms. Case in point, Sprout’s Generate by AI Assist capability helps you save time and effort by generating image alt text options for images shared on social.
Personalize user experience
AI can help deliver highly customized content and ads based on user preferences, past interactions and behaviors. It can also help you capture insights to personalize your content, leading to higher engagement. For example, the Atlanta Hawks used insights from Sprout to understand what type of content and themes resonated the most with their fans during their All-Star Weekend. They used that data to create content benchmarks to assess performance. This helped them capture an audience growth of 170.1% on Facebook within three months, and 127.1% growth in video views.
Improve your ad targeting
Use AI to refine ad targeting by identifying audience segments with similar behaviors or interests. AI can also adjust your ads to reach the right people at the right time through dynamic creative optimization (DCO). This helps you automatically test and adjust ad elements like images, headlines and CTAs in real time to determine the best-performing combinations for each audience segment. This maximizes engagement by tailoring ads to user preferences and behaviors as they evolve.
Similarly, AI social media tools analyze the characteristics of your highest-value customers and identify similar profiles across social platforms. This helps teams expand brand reach to users with a high likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Enhance customer care
According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support on social. AI tools for social media can help your customer care teams provide quick, efficient responses to customers to resolve issues. For example, Sprout enables you to leverage your social media networks into powerful hubs of customer satisfaction and loyalty through AI and automation. Capabilities like AI Assist help care teams customize responses for more personalized support, while case management helps teams categorize and manage tickets more effectively for a seamless experience.
Use sentiment analysis to manage brand satisfaction
Use AI-driven sentiment analysis to gauge how your audience feels about your brand and campaigns. This insight helps you respond proactively to positive or negative shifts in sentiment and ensure a strong brand image.
Sentiment algorithms can also help prioritize customer messages, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox does. They also help set spike alerts in case of message spikes or when certain keywords appear frequently.
Identify and manage influencers and brand advocates
According to our 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, 49% consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts; and 86% make a purchase inspired by influencers at least once a year. The key to a successful influencer strategy is to use the right influencer for your brand.
AI social media platforms like Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger) enable you to identify key influencers and brand advocates who align with your audience and values. Plus, they provide you with key analytics from engagement metrics, demographics and audience alignment so you can have successful partnerships and campaigns.
Continuously test and optimize
AI helps with A/B tests on content, ads and engagement strategies by providing data-driven options that align with your goals. This saves you time and effort, which you can use on other priorities. Insights from these tests help you continuously improve your brand strategy, adapting to what works best for your audience and maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
How to choose the best AI social media tool for your brand
Consider these core factors when you choose the best AI social media tool for your brand.
- Easy integration: Ensure the tool integrates smoothly with your existing social platforms and marketing tech stack for seamless workflow and minimal downtime.
- Analytics and reporting: Look for robust analytics so you get relevant insights on engagement, audience demographics, content performance and social ROI.
- Content automation: Evaluate the AI social media tool’s ability to help with content creation, curation and scheduling to save time and maintain a consistent posting schedule.
- Personalization and targeting: Consider if the tool can analyze audience data to tailor content and ads for specific user segments to improve engagement and post relevancy.
- Sentiment analysis and monitoring: Your AI tool for social media should have strong sentiment analysis and brand monitoring features to track audience sentiment and maintain brand reputation.
- Customer care: Ensure the tool has AI-driven customer care to help personalize responses and give teams a 360-view of the customer’s previous interactions.
With these critical use cases in mind, let’s explore the best AI social media tools that can help strengthen your social media strategy.
Best overall social media AI tool
The best overall social media AI tool combines advanced analytics, personalization and automation, acting as a reliable partner for social media teams. It helps streamline content creation and publishing, optimize customer care, enhance team collaboration and provide actionable insights for impactful brand strategies.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an AI social media management platform that enables you to automate manual tasks in engagement, publishing and social listening, so you can prioritize high-impact work pertinent to your goals. Plus, get critical social analytics easily to meet and exceed customer expectations, and stay ahead of the competition.
Sprout’s textual analysis and sentiment mining capabilities enable you to view key insights like performance metrics and competitor intelligence to optimize your brand messaging, enhance customer experience and foster product innovation. The platform empowers social teams to work more efficiently and enables leaders to make better business decisions.
Here’s a deep dive into Sprout.
Social Listening
Sprout processes an average of 600 million messages a day from across social networks so you’re always in the know.
Optimize social listening with powerful AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities to know what your audiences want, how the competition is faring and what’s trending within seconds. For example, Sprout’s AI-enabled Query Builder helps you extract key insights from social conversations across themes, topics, keywords, audience demographics and locations for brand intelligence.
The named entity recognition (NER) powered capability helps you keep a pulse on the social conversations happening around your brand by filtering millions of conversations to dig into those most relevant to you.
Create Topic Themes and organize, compare and filter your social listening data for targeted insights.
Sprout’s Listening tool also uses sentiment mining to identify positive, negative and neutral chatter around you. With AI social media sentiment analysis you can conduct a regular gut check on your brand health. Automatically tap into negative brand mentions in comments and DMs to get targeted insights into where exactly you need to improve. See where you’ve struck a nerve and resolve issues before they turn into something bigger.
These AI-driven insights enable you to have more meaningful connections with your audience and also help inform your broader marketing, product and research teams in their respective areas.
Also use Sprout’s Social Listening to transform your influencer marketing program. Find the right influencers for your brand, drive creator and influencer strategies and manage campaigns, end-to-end, with Sprout Social Influencer Marketing.
Simplify your processes by unifying all your social channels into a single stream to monitor incoming messages with Sprout’s Smart Inbox feature. Categorize conversations, prioritize messages, effectively tailor agent responses and respond to followers quickly.
Publishing and Engagement
Determine the best times to publish content on each of your channels for engagement and impressions with Sprout’s Optimal Send Times powered by our patented ViralPost® technology.
The ViralPost® algorithm analyzes your audience’s engagement patterns, content velocity and other factors to detect the most active times for authentic engagement.
Craft Listening topics to capture the conversations around your campaign and analyze hashtags to discover metrics around key performance indicators to improve your reach and boost engagement.
Use Sprout’s Suggestions by AI Assist to generate engaging captions in seconds, inspire new ideas and get back time for campaign strategy development. Plus, quickly find brand-relevant content to share with your audience using Sprout’s Find Content.
Analytics
Hit the ground running with analysis-ready models that fit into your existing workflows and gain a 233% return on your investment with Sprout. Don’t take our word for it—read the Total Economic Impact ™ Study by Forrester Consulting and see how Sprout’s social analytics accelerate workflows through centralized insights.
Use Sprout’s Competitive Analysis analytics reports to get a comparative analysis of metrics on important KPIs such as audience sentiment, total engagements and share of voice. You can also tailor your Conversation Overview to organize the available metrics like volume, engagement, likes and impression breakdowns in a way that’s most meaningful to you.
Use the Analyze by AI Assist capability to synthesize data so you can generate important insights for Social Listening topics. Get actionable information by using the Analyze Chart by AI Assist in Sprout’s My Reports charts to get a summary of all important data.
Use these targeted insights to fine-tune your social and overall marketing strategies, boost customer engagement and satisfaction, and enhance growth opportunities.
Automation
Use Sprout’s AI social media capabilities to take on manual processes and consolidate your work. Increase the impact of your social strategy with precise recommendations and compelling content through Sprout’s AI and automation. Minimize manual efforts to elevate customer care and use AI prompts to personalize messages.
Enhance team efficiency by leveraging AI automation to assign priority status and filter high volumes of incoming customer messages so your teams can manage messages based on importance.
What’s more, set up Alerts to immediately know when your brand mentions increase dramatically, so you can investigate and take corrective action promptly and proactively.
And since Sprout’s AI and automation doesn’t require manual setup or continuous investment, see the value of your ROI immediately.
Start your free Sprout Social trial
AI tools for social media listening
AI social media tools analyze social listening data within minutes to give you trending topics, customer preferences and brand insights so you can inform your strategy. Some of these tools include:
2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch helps you understand your social listening data and engage with your audience. Use the platform to manage your campaigns with a collaborative content calendar, set up workflows and track emerging trends through its Smart alerts. These alerts, similar to Sprout Social, notify you of any spikes in brand mentions so you can address them immediately.
3. Dash Hudson
Dash Hudson is a social listening tool that enables you to measure audience engagement, monitor user-generated content and analyze competitor performance. It’s aimed toward visual-first content, which means you can easily see what images and visual posts are trending and analyze them for keywords, engagement and other metrics to inform your strategy.
4. Brand24
Brand24 is an AI social media platform that uses social listening to measure your brand awareness and presence. Track trending hashtags and measure reach and engagement to evaluate your marketing efforts and benchmark against competitors. Use these insights to enhance customer experience and build brand loyalty.
AI tools for social media for scheduling
AI social media tools can automate post-scheduling and publishing tasks to keep your social media engine running 24/7. These tools also incorporate automatic approval workflows so your posts are on-brand and published at the most relevant time for maximum audience engagement. Some top social media scheduling tools include:
5. Feedhive
Feedhive helps you visually plan and schedule your content. It enables you to cross-post content on different social media channels and adjust the copy accordingly. You can also collaborate with team members easily and engage with your audiences—all from within the tool.
6. Feedly
Feedly helps you gather brand and customer insights from multiple sources, including news websites, blogs and newsletters. It automatically curates relevant news and stories from various sources and enables you to share a story across multiple social media networks. You can also schedule posts for optimal send times and share key insights with team members.
AI tools for social media copywriting
AI social media tools for copywriting help you create impactful copy and ideate on fresh topics for your blogs and social posts. They help you break through writer’s block and create content that turns into qualified leads. Ensure your teams follow your company’s AI use policy and you’re in good hands. Some top tools to consider are:
7. Writer
Writer helps you with customized outputs based on your use cases so you can work faster and be more productive. It analyzes spreadsheets, charts, presentations, PDFs and audio and video files. It generates summaries from large texts so you can conduct research easily and create content from various sources. Also, synthesize data to discover insights and surface trends.
8. CoSchedule
CoSchedule enables you to draft content, generate new ideas through keyword suggestions and simplify team workflows. Use the tool to write copy for a variety of content such as blog posts, social posts and press releases in different tones. Also archive generative text chats for future reference so other team members can use them.
9. Ocoya
Use Ocoya to create content in 26 languages. Generate customized social posts and blog articles and take advantage of a repository of thousands of image or video templates. You can schedule your posts and also create collaborative workspaces for team members.
10. Jasper
Use Jasper to create copy for blogs, case studies, social media posts, product descriptions and sales emails. The tool helps you analyze content performance to see which content resonates with your audience better. Also, plan and manage a campaign with the help of a content calendar to create and publish content on time and without hassle.
11. Buffer
Buffer helps you generate fresh content ideas and repurpose your existing content to fine-tune it for different social channels. Drive engagement across all social platforms by understanding your user engagement and adjusting suggestions to improve your copy.
12. StoryLab.ai
StoryLab.ai is an AI social media tool to help you write blog content, social media posts and ad copy. Use keywords to ensure your copy is search-optimized and write in various formats for different business needs. Plus, generate post captions, blog titles and blog outlines that drive engagement and conversions.
AI tools for social media caption writing
AI social media tools can automatically create captions for your social posts based on the brand and audience preference that you provide. Here are some top tools you can choose from.
13. ContentStudio
ContentStudio helps you save time by creating AI-generated copy and captions from pre-made templates for LinkedIn, X, Facebook and Instagram. Also produce AI-generated images for your social posts and improve your post’s visibility by using the tool’s suggested hashtags.
14. Copy.ai
Create on-brand social posts, captions and video descriptions with Copy.ai. The AI-powered tool enables you to generate posts from briefs for LinkedIn, blogs and press releases. Plus, it automates social media workflows and integrates with other tools so your teams can collaborate easily.
15. SocialBu
SocialBu helps you create engaging and meaningful captions for your Instagram posts. Fill in the information your post is about, choose a tone that best describes your brand’s personality and create captions in seconds. The tool also provides suggested hashtags based on your content to improve your post’s visibility to reach a wider audience.
16. VistaSocial
VistaSocial is another great AI social media tool that helps write captions, taglines and social posts. Use the tool to maintain consistent tone, style and messaging across your social profiles to optimize your content. You can also search trending social content and add it to your media library to schedule or repost it into your feed.
Unlock the future with AI for social media marketing
Integrating AI into social media is more than a technological upgrade—it can transform your social media marketing. It empowers you to connect more deeply with your audience, streamline strategies and strengthen brand impact. All this, through real-time audience insights, trend spotting and data-driven decision-making.
As AI continues to advance, social media marketing is poised to become even more personalized, enabling brands like you to foster trust, loyalty and positive interactions.
Sign up for a 30-day free trial of Sprout to explore how AI can help your brand thrive in a competitive market.
AI social media FAQs
Is there an AI for social media?
Yes, there are many AI tools for social media, such as Sprout Social, specifically designed for social media management. These tools help brands streamline social media workflows, create engaging content through social analytics and gain insights into audience behavior.
What is an example of AI on social media?
A common example of AI on social media is Facebook’s (Meta) Content Moderation System. Facebook uses AI algorithms to automatically detect and filter out harmful content, such as hate speech, graphic violence and explicit imagery. The platform uses natural language processing (NLP) and image recognition algorithms to analyze text, images and videos to flag potentially harmful content before users report it or moderators spot it.
How to use AI to generate social media posts?
Use AI to generate ideas for post topics based on trending keywords, popular industry themes or your specific brand’s focus. Input keywords or brief descriptions and AI tools will suggest topics or themes. This will keep your content original while being aligned with what audiences want. Plus, AI tools like Canva and Pinktochart also offer templates, image editing and animation options you can customize for social media posts.
