Having a social media account is as common as having a bank card, and with an estimate of 2.77 billion social media users around the globe in 2019, brands are faced with an unimaginable amount of user-generated data.
Is there a solution to organise this data in order to offer brands meaningful information to improve their social media platforms?
Introducing artificial intelligence. With its ability to combine technologies of natural language processing and machine learning, AI can understand, perform, and learn. Increasing its prominence on social media more than ever. Through the use of data, more meaningful than just keywords, AI is able to retrieve and present more insightful information.
Fueling the feed
Developments using this technology in social media mean that users can have an even better experience navigating their feed. Facebook has invested in AI since 2013, which allows them to track user comments on different topics, enabling them to create a personal rank on the user’s news feed.
What’s left? A user who no longer has to scroll through potentially irrelevant information. All they are interested in, is handed to them at the very top of their feed. Facebook also hopes AI will triumph over understanding more complex emotions like sarcasm, through the use of enabling ‘emotions’ as a reaction to statuses. As a result, a better understanding of the individual user on a different level to normal Facebook metrics, is achieved.
Twitter is also making the most of this development in artificial intelligence. It is now observing trending topics and the content the user engages with most, in order to choose which tweets to rank. Your Twitter feed will only include information that is relevant to your interests, meaning a more personalised, more relevant news feed.
Much like Instagram, Twitter is now moving to abolish chronological tweet rankings, in a bold attempt to move away from the fixation on vanity measures and again, tailor your feed to your interests only. Along with this, the presentation of Twitter is undergoing improvements, taking focus away from followers and in line with AI, is now using this technology in image face detection. Twitter will now be able to deduce the part of an image the user would be interested in for the creation of thumbnails and profile pictures. Once again, social media is able to harness new developments in technology and implement them onto their platforms for the best, and most personalised, user experience.
User experience or user intrusion?
With technological advancement comes user satisfaction. Having a social media presence, regardless of personal reach, comes with dangers of sharing personal information online, and with this added monitoring from AI, users may dislike this increasing intrusion. However, this development in AI is purely created to understand the user on a more insightful level and help construct meaning from high levels of data.
From this, comes the hope that it will change the relationship between technology and people. Creativity and efficiency will improve, and reaching this 2.77 billion social media users around the world, won’t seem like an impossible task.
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