In digital marketing, it’s all about working with data. You need to analyze conversion rates and look for the most effective content. The same applies to social media marketing.
When it comes to social media, there is a lot of data. This is why you need to consider data when planning your Instagram marketing campaigns.
According to statistics, people create 95 million new posts on Instagram every day. If we do not have technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, it will be very difficult to track and analyze all this information. By using artificial intelligence to analyze data, businesses can gain countless insights into human behavior. In this, we will examine how Instagram uses machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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The impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on social media
Instagram has certain advantages over other social media. The thing is, many people on Instagram don’t use other platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Therefore, Instagram allows you to study a unique demographic and tailor your marketing strategies to that category. Optimize specific users. In addition, Instagram users are more engaged with brands. Every day, about 200 million Instagram users visit business profiles, and even 80% of users follow at least one business on the platform. Therefore, Instagram users like advertising messages more than users of other social networks.
Detailed insight thanks to more information
Analyzing Instagram and other social media offers countless benefits for marketing. Sorting, analyzing, and classifying this information and user interaction is a difficult and time-consuming task. Machine learning enables analysis with any amount of data, analyzing billions of posts.
Image analysis
Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat are platforms that focus on visual content.
Image recognition is very challenging. Identifying the content of images is only possible thanks to deep learning. Social media platforms can now analyze images and recognize different objects, faces, logos, etc.
Understanding user behavior
Automated analysis of user-generated content is challenging because people can use sarcasm, different synonyms, and phrases with more than one meaning.
Previously, computers were unable to identify the true intent and tone of messages, but machine learning has allowed developers to create more sophisticated solutions that understand the true meaning of posts. Such solutions allow companies to accurately analyze sentiment while saving time and money.
Translation
AI can recognize patterns and can work with any language, which is especially important for large companies that sell their products or services in different countries. Therefore, companies can track the feedback of all consumers and are no longer limited to audiences from a specific region. This AI feature also helps to create content in different languages without the need to hire translators.
Analysis of new trends
By identifying new patterns, AI allows businesses to place posts into a pre-defined category of classification. In addition, machine learning can detect emerging topics and trends that do not fit within these predefined parameters.
Algorithms identify common features and select posts that have a lot in common. This method is called unsupervised machine learning.
Instagram, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
The success of social media marketing largely depends on the influencer. Influencers have a very good ability to introduce and promote any product to their loyal followers.
According to research, every dollar invested in influencer marketing returns $6.50 in revenue.
However, finding the right influencer for your brand can be a difficult task. For this reason, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted a study in which they considered the use of artificial intelligence to find the most profitable partnerships.
Small brands often don’t have enough resources to find the right influencer, and machine learning can help them.
The researchers developed an AI-based content analysis tool capable of targeting brands and analyzing media, hashtags, and captions using Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
This tool analyzes images from different categories using Google’s TensorFlow and appropriate tags. Also, each tag had a numeric value that indicates the frequency of use in a particular profile.
Another research conducted by Cornell University was on clothing patterns. By analyzing Instagram photos, researchers have collected a huge amount of data that indicate emerging trends and changes in fashion. They managed to track different items, styles, and colors as well as seasonal variations.
Researchers have also been able to tell which trends are stronger in a particular region. Such information can be very useful for clothing brands who can make decisions and produce new products not based on their estimates, but based on real data that reflects the preferences of a specific audience.
How does Instagram use Big Data and machine learning?
Targeted advertising
The data collected from Instagram is invaluable as it provides useful analytics for businesses. Instagram monitors its users’ searches and engagement and sells ads to companies that are interested in a specific type of audience.
In this way, companies can reach users who are interested in a specific marketing message. Considering that Instagram is owned by Facebook, it has a 1.8 billion audience and there is a lot to analyze.
Audiences can receive highly targeted ads based on the topics they share and the things they like. Targeting is one of the most important advantages of artificial intelligence in social media marketing and also in email marketing.
Fight against spam
Instagram also uses artificial intelligence to filter spam. This platform can identify fake messages and remove them from accounts. Currently, this system works with nine languages, including English, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic. Spam detection is possible thanks to DeepText, (an AI-based algorithm that reads text and understands its content).
The same algorithm is also used by Facebook.
Search and explore the page
AI-powered search tools easily analyze millions of posts to find content about specific places, activities, and topics that interest you.
Research on culture and human behavior
Instagram aims to make its users feel part of a global community. Therefore, the company must understand how people behave in different parts of the world. Such tasks require working with a lot of data, and this is where artificial intelligence should come in. Complex research that takes decades can be done at high speed by AI.
Improve user experience
The success of any social media depends on how easily users can find content that interests them, and Instagram must create this interest. The more users upload, the wider the list of available content. It will be more difficult to make an interesting case in this abundance of information.
Instagram’s previous algorithm displayed posts in a feed in reverse chronological order, which was a simple but effective approach.
Today, an algorithm based on artificial intelligence selects the most desirable content and sends it to each user who is most likely to visit them.
This would never be possible without machine learning. This algorithm learns and improves all the time and selects the most relevant and valuable posts for everyone.
The old algorithm also caused users to miss 50% of their friend’s posts, while the new one provides 90% of that content.
Given the over-popularity of social media and its importance in our lives, many people with visual impairments report feeling deprived and frustrated using social networks. Recently, the company realized that with its new technology, it can make this operating system more accessible to 285 million users.
Artificial intelligence recognizes and analyzes photos and describes them automatically. Now visually impaired users can browse profiles, feeds, and search sections with the help of screen readers. The Alt Text algorithm recognizes objects and lists them. When posting a photo, users can also turn on the “Alt Text” feature in the “Advanced Settings” menu to have more control over this description by adding their text.