The Real Reason Most AI Social Tools Are Useless (or a Liability) for Brands

Part of the problem is how marketers misuse it. There are plenty of cautionary tales; brands like Guess and J.Crew that were seduced into leveraging AI to simply make more stuff—as if the internet isn’t already overstuffed with content. But the other, more fundamental problem is with the AI platforms themselves. 

The truth is, AI and social media don’t speak the same language. Where AI platforms are very good at giving you an answer, social media is often about demonstrating that there isn’t one. The entire culture of social media is built on shared, narrowly contextual and unpredictable reference points that evolve by the second. In response to the uncertainty this creates, most platforms give up, put an AI chatbot next to a standard social analytics dashboard, and hope for the best.

These kinds of half-hearted AI-powered platforms are growing in number every month, with each of them offering the types of capabilities that make them either useless to social media marketers or a liability. Fixing that means demanding more, not only from ourselves as marketers but from the AI platforms too.

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AI presents unique limitations for marketing

The central disconnect is that too many AI platforms treat efficiency as the singular goal. On social, that translates into features that let you publish twice as much mediocre content, all without actually doubling your marketing performance. Instead, these tools need to be rethought to use AI to help a brand find the one observation, conversation or creative opportunity everyone else missed.

That takes a greater level of social intelligence; building an AI platform with access to the actual history and behavior of the brand: how people talk to it, what the community responds to, what has worked before, what has backfired, what competitors are doing and what is changing…right now. Even as social media has become more central to brand-building, little has been done to serve this crucial need. But for brands hoping to find the right AI platform for their social marketing, here’s what they should look out for:

• Real-time. Really. AI platforms are only useful for social media if their features work in real-time. You don’t need another trend report telling you something became popular after everyone already knows it became popular. You need AI to help you connect dots while something is happening; what conversations are accelerating, who’s driving them, where they started and is your audience participating? Most importantly, it needs to help you answer if your brand should just sit a conversation out.
  
• A long memory. Imagine giving a social strategist access to years of your brand’s posts, comments, community conversations, performance, creator relationships, competitive activity and cultural moments, and allowing them to interrogate all of it. An AI platform can serve this function, but only if it does more than track. It has to remember, getting smarter every year it spends on social. The right use of AI can make institutional memory an invaluable and permanent resource for your brand.
  
• More meaning. Humans are fantastic at judgment but terrible at reading 80,000 comments before lunch. AI should be doing the latter, showing you the unexpected patterns, the comment that represents a trend, and what people who love your product say differently from people who stopped buying it. Most social listening platforms already use AI to analyze huge volumes of conversation. But a truly powerful AI platform makes that intelligence genuinely useful to the people deciding what a brand does tomorrow.
  
• Partnership, not competition. AI platforms should make employees more curious, not less necessary. Your strategist should be able to ask ten questions in the time they previously had to ask one. Your creative team should be able to explore an idea from twenty angles. Your community manager should walk into work already knowing which conversations changed overnight. And all of this should be on a platform that’s designed with a real person’s needs in mind, making each employee a stronger advocate for your brand. 

Before brands rely on AI tools to make their social media content, AI platforms need to help them understand what is happening online, so they can decide what deserves to be made in the first place. As social media becomes even more influential, it’s those AI platforms that can help brands better understand themselves and their audiences that will not only prove their usefulness, but ultimately make social culture stronger in the process.