Unless you’ve been err… living under a rock these days, then it’s likely you’ve heard the hype around artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing. Is it just a buzzword or is this thing literally about to revolutionize the world? And is it a friend or foe to us social media managers? Should we hide underneath our desks and wait for all of this to blow over or should we be joining the army of AI enthusiasts and tech bros, adapting to this new way of working from fear of being left behind…Feeling confused? From one social media manager to another, we’re here to offer some advice on the use of AI in marketing. We’ll explain some of the benefits of befriending AI along with our recommendations for some of the best AI tools for modern social media teams.

How can AI for social media benefit your team?

It feels like every day there’s a new shiny AI app that shows promise to completely transform your work process - from tools that can quite literally write a whole blog post based on a few prompts, to AI-powered image creators. These advancements have us both blown away yet kinda nervous about our jobs at the same time. There lies the debate - should we be using AI tools for content?The truth is, as social media marketers, we’re all too familiar with how hard it can be to keep up with the content creation process. From photography and graphic design to writing captions and scheduling posts, there are so many tasks to complete. Some businesses have a whole social media team on hand to seamlessly execute their social strategy. But for other smaller teams or even one-man-bands, there are simply never enough hours in the day to cross through that never-ending to-do list.And that’s where AI content tools can prove to be handy. Just some of the use cases of AI in social media management include:

• Content scheduling and recommending the best posting times

• Writing captions for your content

• Generating ideas for content topics

• Customer experience and chatbots

• Social insights and social listening

• Image creation

🏆 The top 5 AI-powered social media tools 2023 

Now that we’ve discussed how AI can complement (and not replace!!) social media marketers, keep reading to check out Slate’s recommendations for some of the best AI social media tools of 2023.

💬 ChatGPT: Your social media all-rounder

In recent weeks, much of the chatter around AI in marketing has centered mainly around ChatGPT. This AI tool is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that has the ability to generate human-like text. If you’ve been following along with the conversations, you would know that it’s proving to be a pretty powerful tool for all kinds of applications, and not just for social media marketing.With just a simple prompt, the tool harnesses its advanced language understanding capabilities to deliver social media managers fresh and engaging content - something that we all know can take a lot of time and effort. Better yet, users can instruct ChatGPT on their tone of voice, ensuring that the copy is on-brand and engaging as opposed to the cold and robotic copy we often see from these kinds of AI-writing tools.Just some examples of how social media teams around the globe are harnessing ChatGPT include: generating personalized captions; providing responses to customer service inquiries;  writing unique product descriptions; creating Twitter threads by summarising complex news stories into Twittable bites; generating video and podcast scripts; and lots more. It’s even more impressive when you consider the fact the tool is just in its early stages. Check it out.

🤗 HeyDay: Your customer experience helper

As social media managers, we all know how hard it can be to keep up with customer demands via social. The challenge faces by many of today’s brands is the ability to give fast and personalized attention to daily interactions and conversations that pile into our DMs. But it’s a task that brands simply cannot afford to neglect due to its role in building customer loyalty and delivering the best possible service.That’s where HeyDay comes into play. Its powerful AI technology automates time-consuming interactions, freeing your social team up to give human attention to the conversation that truly needs it.Better yet, this advanced conversational AI tool does a whole lot more than simply tracking customer queries. Using Natural Language Processing, it can provide product recommendations and even make a sale! It’s a pretty impressive tool for social commerce, ensuring your brand delivers seamless customer service without the added pressure on your already-stretched team. Check it out.

🧑‍💻 Otter.AI: Your AI assistant

We’ve all been there — asked to take minutes in a team meeting, frantically trying to jot down what Martin from Sales has to say whilst mentally preparing for your turn under the spotlight. Then after making it through the meeting, you have to attempt to make sense of the jumbled gobble-de-goop before sending it out in an email to the whole business - including top stakeholders. Just makes my palms sweaty thinking about it.Relate? Give Otter.AI a try. Dubbed an ‘AI assistant’, this tool writes and summarizes meeting notes for your team, 30 times faster than you can. It allows you and the team to be way more productive and collaborative by empowering you with accurate notes that are stored in one central (and searchable) place!It works by recording your meeting and creating an accurate transcription. This makes it even more useful for social teams who can leverage its functions to transcribe content such as video interviews and podcasts and use the transcription to repurpose it into other content types. You can only imagine the heaps of time you’ll save from no longer having to manually transcribe! Check it out.

✍️ Copy.ai: Your compelling copywriting assistant 

Writing exceptional copy is a skill needed by today’s social media teams. It helps capture your audience's attention, it provides valuable information, and SEO-optimized copy helps get your content out there. Good copy is essentially what leads to clicks, conversions, and sales.Looking to support social media marketers whose creative juices might be running a little low is content AI tool, Copy.ai. This handy writing tool creates engaging copy based on a few simple prompts, saving heaps of time and effort for social teams.If you struggle to come up with daily social posts or fall victim to writer’s block every now and then, you just have to check this tool out. Professional marketing teams from brands as big as Microsoft and eBay are leveraging the AI tool to support the creation of compelling social media copy including Facebook posts, Pinterest YouTube, and Instagram descriptions, TikTok scripts, LinkedIn posts, and more. We don’t recommend using tools like this to replace human copywriting since they definitely lack the depth, personality, and flare that’s so needed to engage readers. But the tool’s ability to give you writing prompts cannot be understated. Check it out.

🧑‍🏫 Grammarly: Your AI-powered writing assistant

This AI-powered tool has become a firm favorite for social media marketers and content writers everywhere. If you’re someone who writes content on a daily basis and perhaps experienced posting something with an embarrassing typo (come on, we’ve all been there!), then this one’s for you… Grammarly is an online grammar checker, spelling checker, and plagiarism detection platform that can either be added as a plugin, installed on your system as an application, or used within its browser format. The AI-powered writing assistant provides sophisticated suggestions for improvement as your write. With just a click of the mouse, you can make instant improvements to your copy, enabling you to craft smarter, crisper, and error-free social media copy for your channels. Check it out.

Allowing social teams to work smarter, not harder 🚀

So, will robots take our jobs? Here at Slate, we believe that AI isn’t something to be feared within social media marketing. AI tools for digital marketing and social media will enable teams to work smarter, alleviating some of the mounting pressure felt by marketers today. This will ultimately lead to more room being freed up for marketers to focus more on the strategy and the bigger picture - something that AI isn’t so clued up on.On the subject of working smarter, it would honestly be rude of us not to mention our content creation platform. We’ve been helping social teams across the US and beyond unlock their full potential by totally streamlining the way they produce social media content. It’s a simple 3-step process.

1. First, upload all of your brand assets using the Slate Brand Portal.

2. Start whipping up creations with your brand assets in the Slate Creation Studio (web and mobile)

3. Share content directly to any social network - anywhere and at anytime.

Intrigued to hear more? Watch this video to see Slate in action.