The pressure for brands to be bigger, better, and more on-trend is ever-growing, particularly on social media. But maintaining the necessary presence and output can be next to impossible without the use of AI tools. The problem is, with thousands of AI tools out there, and new ones popping up every day, it can be hard to cut through the noise and find the things that can actually help.
These are the essential AI tools I now use every day to support everything from strategy and analysis to design and content creation. They could help your business too.
16 AI apps to step up your company’s social media content management
Research and insights
For any digital content to work, you have to know your audience. And it goes far beyond simple demographic basics, like age and gender. You need more reliable predictors of what messages will resonate, and that means using tools to work out your target’s behaviours, attitudes, values, and content preferences.
My first port of call for this is Perplexity. It’s free to use for the basic package, with a $20 subscription fee for anyone who wants to access more features. And it’s my go-to starting place for any research projects, where I need to pull out facts and figures and break into the finer details.
If I’ve got multiple sources to analyse, on the other hand, I go to Notebook LM. Although it’s marketed as a note-taking tool, its greatest feature is its ability to be able to extract data from various file types – documents, multimedia – before presenting it in bite-sized notes. More often than not, I use it for mining key insights from heavy industry reports and white papers.
Other times, you just need to know what the science is behind an argument. And that’s where Consensus comes in. Whether it’s consumer behaviour, media consumption, or straight scientific research, Consensus can provide instant summaries of relevant scientific papers.
Strategy and planning
Too many businesses enter into social media without a strategy to guide them. The result is a haphazard approach with poor ROI. AI can provide you with the tools you need to understand your goals and build a strategy to achieve them.
The search, memory, and project features of ChatGPT can be invaluable in this area, helping you to mould a bespoke end-to-end social strategy to meet the needs of your business. Not sure where to start? This is my cheat sheet of prompts, which you can use to build a fully rounded strategy.
Writing
Words matter. Whether you’re focusing on advertising or building customer trust, the words you use online can make or break a business. Which is why finding the right AI writing tools is so important. Not just because of the words they choose, but the tone that they use and the voice that they bring to your business.
When you’re wanting to make that human connection Claude has a lot to offer. With the ability to train pre-set writing styles, you can bring a natural touch to all of your communications.
For more professional work, Lex provides writers with a distraction-free interface and advanced feedback on long-form articles and white papers. It’s become an indispensable tool for those involved in lengthy written projects.
And if you’re looking to improve your own writing and output over time, AI for Work provides an enormous prompt database, enabling users to learn as they work.
Imagery and design
There aren’t many small businesses able to take on dedicated design and imagery professionals. This leads to significant outsourcing overheads for even small-scale projects. AI can help to address this. While larger companies with inhouse photography, art, and design teams are making use of AI to expedite project completion, share ideas, and build proof-of-concepts.
Both Midjourney and Ideogram are a fantastic resource for the rapid creation of bespoke imagery. Generating art – whether posters, logos, and ads, or more photo-realistic imagery – from text prompts, they can save businesses time and money.
While for imagery and design professionals, there’s Adobe Firefly. Suitable for integration with the rest of the Adobe suite, it can be used to both generate new images, or edit existing ones.
Video and audio
Video has become the most effective medium for engaging customers, which is why all social channels now prioritise it in their feeds. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, video content can be a costly and complex thing to get right. Again, AI can help.
If you want straight down the line video generation to support any subject, Pika is the tool for you. It manages to be both fun and sophisticated while being easy to use, making it accessible for all comers. While if you’re wanting to work with existing footage, to edit it or improve it, Luma is hard to beat.
As for audio, if you need a voice over but would prefer to avoid the expense of a professional voice artist, Eleven Labs is very much worth your time. As well as being quick and incredibly easy to use, it can clone someone’s voice based upon a single minute recording. And yet, it manages to be one of the most realistic voice generators around.
Reporting and analytics
AI’s reporting and analytics abilities is what initially caught the attention of business world beyond technology. It can gather and process data in a way that no human team can ever hope to compete with. And you can use this to enhance your social media performance.
ChatGPT and Claude are both excellent resources for large-scale dataset analysis. You just need to upload XLS or CSV files exported from your existing marketing stack, and let your chosen programme do the rest. But why stop there? With Gamma, you can go on to use that data to automatically create whatever content you need – PowerPoint slides, presentations, social carousels, or landing pages.
And then we have Rows, which makes your live data accessible and useful. By pulling in and analysing live analytics from most parts of your marketing stack – website, commerce, social, CRM – it can provide you with a low-effort, high-value live dashboard, which you can then analyse further with Rows’ built-in AI analyst.
We’ve got a long way to go before AI becomes a business catch-all. Right now, you still need the human element. The professional writers, designers, creators, and even analysts, because AI only delivers when you give it the right information, and you have the right people to use it. But if your business is struggling to stay up to date with social media’s demands, AI is there to help speed things along, enhancing quality and output in one. The trick is knowing which AI tools will work for you.
BY Will Francis, digital marketing expert.
Will trains thousands of marketers each year at the top institutions including Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK) and the American Marketing Association. His marketing experience spans years running and working at ad agencies with the world’s most loved brands. As an industry authority he regularly appears at conferences and in the media to share his expertise. He hosts ‘Ahead of the Game’, the DMI’s marketing podcast, and is a published author with Prestel (Penguin Random House).
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