Social media has taken over the Internet and the lives of so many people. Almost everyone on the planet who has access to a computer has at least one social media account. Some of the most popular social media platforms today are Facebook and Twitter and they are both widely used by everyone. Because of the popularity of social media, businesses from all over the world has chosen to apply digital intelligence to help them in their endeavours.
There are many conversations in social media. The amount of buzz as well as the enormous growth can be very difficult to keep up with. Because of this, various companies have opted to automate their responses, be it for better or for worse. Very busy industries such as telecommunications and airlines have had to deal with thousands of customers daily and they can no longer keep up with angry rants and other dissatisfied people. They also want to use social media to reach out to potential customers and woo them.
Social media automation
What is social media automation? Social media automation is a subset of social performance software. It takes cues from optimised channels, automated IVR (interactive voice response) systems and optimisation software seen in digital advertising. It is already a known fact that 40% of social networking accounts are not real ones but spam. So, in essence automation is no longer new.
Types of social media performance
- Human-like relationships. In the long run, artificial intelligence will be capable of simulating human-like behavior. It will be a conversationalist, a host and a real-life concierge. Several companies today are already looking working on artificial intelligence which are capable of a lot of things.
- Content publishing on timer. There are already dozens of social media management systems which enable people to publish content on timer and they will be used continuously in the future.
- Social content optimisation. If you want to publish the right content at the right time, you need social content optimisation and a few examples of such products are Prosodic and SocialFlow.
- Proactive response. In the near future, we will be seeing vendors applying technology such as virtual agents that will help support brand interactions.
Benefits of Automated Response
There are numerous upsides to automated response being employed by companies. Success will be easily measured through response rates; reduced costs; speed and increased customer support. The data gathered will give companies new insights that will also help predict exactly what customers want.
However, there are also downsides to automated response and they can be damaging. People want to talk to real people; they do not want to talk to machines. Ask anyone and they will tell you just how much they detest having to talk to machines. I am quite certain that everyone remembers all the uproar that happened when telephone operators were replaced with IVRs. It is safe to say that the very same thing will happen when everything becomes automated. Nothing can quite replace real people.