How to use AI for social media marketing

How is AI changing social media marketing?

In just a few years, AI has reshaped social media. According to Louis-Daniel Bernier, Senior Business Advisor at BDC Advisory Services, people saw an estimated 500 to 1,500 ads per day in the predigital era. During the social media era, from 2010 to 2020, that number rose to 4,000 to 10,000 daily interactions. Today, AI makes it easier to create content, exposing consumers to more than 10,000 ads per day. As a result, potential buyers are more saturated than ever.

For business leaders, the key question is not whether to use AI in social media. It is how to use it without compromising authenticity or inducing brand fatigue among your target audience.

According to Bernier: “The main takeaway is that competitive advantage is shifting away from production capacity. As content becomes easier to generate, differentiation increasingly depends on an authentic and distinctive brand voice.”

How is AI used in social media marketing?

Small businesses are using AI tools to help them with different tasks around social media. Here are the five main ways they could help you.

1. Create content (text, visuals, video)

AI tools can help you generate content ideas, draft posts or articles, and even produce visuals. For example, a café could use AI to quickly create a week of Instagram posts to promote seasonal drinks, including captions and image ideas. These tools can also produce visuals or short videos, allowing businesses without in-house designers to maintain a consistent presence. 

2. Target your audience and personalize

AI can help you identify and segment audiences based on behaviour, interests, demographics, purchasing habits and engagement patterns. This ensures that the right message reaches the right customer segment rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.

3. Optimize posting times

The timing of a post can have a big impact on its reach. AI tools can analyze past engagement data to help you decide what to post and when. For example, a fitness studio might discover that its audience is most active on weekday mornings and schedule posts accordingly.

4. Monitor conversations and analyze sentiment

Small companies are using AI to monitor what people are saying about their brand across social media platforms. These tools can show you whether sentiment is positive, neutral or negative. They can also track broader trends in customer conversations, helping you adapt messaging in real time.

5. Optimize paid media

AI can help you get better results from paid social campaigns by adjusting bids and audiences automatically. For example, an e-commerce store could use AI to test different Facebook ads and move budget to the one that performs best. AI can also pause underperforming ads in real time, helping reduce wasted spend. 

How to use AI agents for social media marketing

AI agents are artificial intelligence tools that can generate content, answer questions, and perform tasks. Currently, there are three main ways in which AI agents can help your business with social media.

1. Manage interactions at scale

AI agents can help respond to comments, messages or basic customer questions. This makes it easier to remain responsive without increasing your team’s workload. AI can also improve chatbots, giving customers faster, more consistent replies. This frees up time for your team to focus on more complex or high-value interactions that require a human touch.

2. Support content execution

AI can help you draft posts and adapt content for different social media platforms. Each one, from TikTok and Instagram to LinkedIn and Facebook, has its own tone, length and content format (e.g., video, image or text). AI can take one idea and turn it into several platform-specific versions, helping you save time and stay consistent across channels.

3. Improve performance over time

AI can review engagement data, such as likes, comments and shares, to suggest what content to prioritize and when to publish it. But these tools should support your decisions, not make them for you. “Remember that you, the entrepreneur, as well as your team, are often best positioned to understand customers on the ground and define the broader targeting strategy,” says Bernier. “AI can refine execution, but it cannot replace strategic judgment or market intuition.”

According to Bernier, the bottom line is to use AI to handle volume, but keep human oversight for high-value interactions, strategic planning and crafting a brand voice.

What is AI slop?

AI tools simplify and lower the cost of content creation. As a result, they have led to the emergence of a new type of content called AI slop. 

“In simple terms, AI slop is to social media what spam is for emails,” illustrates Bernier. AI slop refers to AI-generated content that is often generic, low-quality and low-value, produced and published at scale. It is often designed to maximize engagement, and therefore often relies on exaggeration, sensationalism, novelty, outrage or fear. 

Because this type of content competes aggressively for attention without adding real value or a distinctive voice, it undermines audience trust and erodes brand differentiation.

To avoid falling prey to AI slop, follow these three tips:

1. Protect and cultivate authenticity

Expertise, voice and perspective are key differentiators in an AI-saturated environment. Use AI to support production, but ensure every piece of content reflects something genuinely specific about your business.

2. Prioritize human validation

Having the right creative team in place is more important than ever. Human review ensures content is accurate, on brand and not drifting into generic or interchangeable messaging.

3. Focus on real people and experience

True humans are the opposite of AI slop. Use real customers, employee stories and testimonials to anchor your content in lived reality and counterbalance overly synthetic outputs.

Pros and cons of using AI for social media marketing

AI offers clear benefits to businesses when it comes to managing their social media, but it also introduces a number of trade-offs.

Advantages

• Improved efficiency
  Content is faster than ever to produce and adapts to different platforms, allowing small teams to maintain a more active presence.
• Enhanced customer targeting
  AI helps businesses segment audiences and tailor messaging based on behavior, interests and engagement patterns. This leads to more relevant content and higher conversion potential.
• Improved data analysis and predictive capabilities
  AI can process large volumes of engagement data to identify trends and predict what content will perform best and when it should be published. This supports more informed, data-driven decisions.

Challenges

• Content standardization and loss of differentiation
  Over-reliance on AI can lead to generic content that looks and feels similar across brands, weakening your positioning and distinctiveness.
• Bias and ethical concerns
  AI systems can reproduce biases, which may lead to inappropriate messaging, misrepresentation or skewed targeting.
• Governance challenges
  As your content production scales after introducing AI, it can become harder to maintain oversight. Without clear guidelines and review processes, businesses risk off-brand messaging.

All in all, despite these potential pitfalls, AI remains a powerful tool for optimizing social media marketing. For many small businesses, the question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to use it effectively.

Next step

Learn what it takes to successfully integrate AI in your business processes by downloading BDC’s free report on The Digital Transformation of SMEs in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.