Social Media Automation Tools — AI or Not AI
Anyone using social media automation tools will tell you they are a massive time saver. By logging in to one account to manage, say ten social media accounts, you can save 30 minutes from the start. Social media automation goes a lot further than a simple login feature; content calendar post management and metrics dashboards are two of the most significant features of these tools.
The top tools in the social media content posting management and automation space are:
- Hootsuite
- Social Champ
- Social Pilot
- Buffer
- Agora Pulse
- Social Oomph
- Sprout Social
- Crowd Fire
- Meet Edgar
- Coschedule
All of these tools allow the connection to multiple social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter and have a bulk upload feature where the user can create a 100 post csv file, upload it to one of the above tools, and have the content in the csv automatically post on a scheduled day and time.
As you can see, automation tools are great at removing bottlenecks in content distribution. The latest bottleneck being tackled is the creation of the content itself and this is where AI may come in play. A simple tool like Social Media Hammer, for example, will crawly your website or uploaded pdf and allow you to export a 300 post csv file. The content comes straight from your website, this means, you may have to do a little editing to remove phone numbers or edit the opening of the post to add context. There really is no AI going on at this level — it’s more brute force.
A similar tool to Social Media Hammer is trylately.com which claims to make use of AI but on a deeper dive, looks the same as Social Media Hammer but may have a few word replacement algorithms.
A third tool, Meet Edgar, which is also listed in the account management group, has a content creation function they call, Natural Language Processing which, looks like AI but is still algorithm based.
With the current costs of true AI, it may be some time until low cost apps can deploy actual machine learning. So, as to the question AI or not AI? We’re not there yet as your choices are very low cost brute force with some editing time, or one or two hundred dollars a month for an automated thesaurus added to the process.
What do you think? Have you found any true AI in social media automation yet?
