social media bots

In generic terms, AI means greater flexibility, quicker data retrieval, advanced interactions with customers and lesser human interventions. This is something like a blessing in disguise for business owners and marketers wanting to incorporate AI in their business. Moreover, AI being a one-time investment, wouldn’t cost a fortune.

Small businesses can take advantage of the advancement of technology by using accessible tools like social media bots.

Social Media Bots & Its Usage:

Social media bots are virtual robots powered by artificial intelligence. These bots can interact with humans and answer their queries without getting exhausted. Despite them sounding human, they are nothing but accounts that are automated and controlled by a code.

These social media bots are pieces of software or algorithms using AI to automate the tasks and carry interactions with humans, to help them. Media bots help in building stronger relationships with customers by delivering targeted content and anticipating user reactions. These bots can be programmed to perform tasks such as answering and sending direct messages, liking posts or following other users, helping humans find information online and so on, depending on the platform they are used in.  

Related: Techniques to Boost Your Brand on Social Media

Bots and Social Media Growth:

The purpose of AI and social media bots is to support marketers in connecting with customers more efficiently, in the field of online marketing. Sectors such as retail, transport, travel,  entertainment, health, and finance could use social bots as assistants. By providing real-time customer support and simplifying buying procedures, bots can help small business owners on their social media pages.

Social media bots can boost the business growth of social media pages by:

  • Answering simple user questions
  • Conveying relevant content based on context
  • Sending personalized messages
  • Facilitating sales
  • Sending account or order notifications
  • Providing real-time reports fro analytics
  • Collating beneficial information about customers

Social media bots can be interspersed with email marketing services for nurturing campaigns and send traffic to the business owner’s website by delivering personalized content to users. With bots, you can upsell or cross-sell products that lead to improving conversions.

Risks Involved With Bots in Business:

After reading through the blog so far, you could think what could go wrong when using bots for business right? Social media bots can indeed do marvelous things but are not entirely risk-free. Shoddily designed and programmed bots can wreak your business as they could annoy users and waste their time instead of assisting the users or customers.

Sometimes bots can affect your brand’s credibility and reputation as bots don’t understand contexts as humans do and they might retweet or like messages that do not reflect your brand’s positioning and tone of voice. There are instances where bots have contributed to altering analytics data by artificially inflating the brand’s follower count, or even redirecting bot traffic to the business website. Inflating follower count is not good in certain contexts.

The most damning of all is that the bots can be instrumental in spreading fake news which could influence the general perception of the public negatively or positively, depending on the event.

In conclusion, you could start with the FB Messenger platform itself if you are looking for a safe, tried and tested service for creating your first social media bot.  Despite the process is a little more complicated than with other services, there is a lot of documentation and resources online. With the information we have collated for you about social media bots, are you ready to use social media bots to assist your customers and grow your pages.