Artificial Intelligence (AI) – The Social Media Droid
Artificial Intelligence is a complex and dynamic field today. Businesses, as well as common people all, have started using AI in a very big way. Digital voice assistants like Alexa (by Amazon); Siri (Apple); Cortana (by Microsoft) have been designed to process as well as create the natural language as used by humans. These artificial intelligence programs can deeply understand, follow, and respond to the spoken or written commands given by humans.
Artificial intelligence had its humble beginnings, as compared to the wonders that it is achieving in modern times. It all began with the “Turing test” conducted by Alan Turing in 1950. Initially in this test, the interrogator had to identify which answer had been given by a man and which one had been given by a woman. The participants involved in the test, a man and a woman, did not respond by speaking. Their answers were typed or repeated by another person.
But in the next version of the Turing test, the interrogator had to differentiate between a human and a machine. One of the two participants was a machine and if it could pass off as human, it raised the possibility of creating “Thinking Machines”.
Later in 1956 and 1959, the terms “Artificial Intelligence “and “Machine Learning” were, consecutively, used for the first time by John McCarthy and Arthur Samuel.
“Natural Language Processing (NLP)” and “Natural Language Generation (NLG), are vital parts of AI. NLP is the ability of a machine to read or understand the content created by humans in the form of spoken or written words.
NLG refers to the ability of a machine to build a conversation with humans by creating content in spoken or written language.
“Machine Learning” means that the machines learn from the data that they have access to. That means there is no need for humans to program the machines as they gain the capability to self – learn, though the data is provided by humans only. This is how the digital assistants like Alexa and Siri work. They continue to accumulate data in the form of positive and negative feedback provided by the customers. They learn and improve with the experience that they get during these interactions with humans.
The earlier platforms of market interaction like newspapers, radio, and television were slow and limited in their reach to the customers. But social media is a way faster and effective mode of reaching out to the customers and influencing them. Artificial intelligence plays a really critical role in this success of social media.
The integration of AI with social media platforms has helped them to track, analyze and use the current trends in various areas of human life. The businesses can be promptly alerted by the AI systems about any new trend or a brand mention on various social networks.
It is not humanly possible to gather and evaluate all the collective “Big Data” that is being constantly produced by the relentless usage of world wide web and social media by people around the globe. Artificial intelligence has become quite an efficient “Social Media Monitoring and Management” tool. This fact has made the marketers rely heavily on artificial intelligence in order to gain maximum from their use of social media for different aspects of business operation.
Following are some of the ways in which artificial intelligence is involved in social media marketing:
The millions of pictures posted by people all over social media are analyzed by intelligent “Image Recognition Software”. This helps the companies to understand what people want. With this understanding, they can plan their marketing and advertising activities in a more targeted way.
“Facial Recognition” is another feature that has been made possible with the use of artificial intelligence. Facebook uses this tool to enable the users to tag people in group photos. Without this feature, the users would have to invest a lot of time in searching for people by names before they can tag them.
“Content Marketing” is an effective instrument for the businesses to attract and convert the people visiting various social media sites. “Content Development and Content Optimization” are two important aspects of content marketing. Artificial intelligence can help the marketers with creation of content that is most relevant and can effectively reach the targeted audience.AI can also optimize this content by enabling the marketers to get a right mix of text, photos and videos so that it can strike the right chord with their audience.