TL;DR
- AI tools WILL improve your efficiency. 80% of social marketers are already using AI in their jobs, so don’t fall behind. AI speeds up data analysis, content creation, and scheduling, freeing you to focus on strategy.
- AI-enhanced targeting yields better results. Use AI tools to dig into audience data, spot industry gaps, and craft hyper-personalized content or ads (e.g., dynamic Meta campaigns). AI can help you work smarter, not just faster.
- Keep humans in the driver’s seat. AI excels at simple reasoning, writing first drafts, brainstorming, and repurposing content — but human edits are still crucial for authenticity and engagement.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in social media can be controversial. Some marketers embrace it as a tool that enhances productivity, freeing up time for more strategic and creative thinking. Others take a more skeptical view, worried that AI may lower the overall quality of content marketing or even threaten their jobs.
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter at this point what you think of AI, in social media or in pretty much any other area of modern life. Hootsuite’s original research shows that the vast majority (80%) of social marketers are using AI for at least some of their creative tasks.
If you’re still doing everything manually, you’re at a disadvantage compared to those who are experimenting with AI tools and learning how best to incorporate them into their workflows.
As you’ll see in this post, AI works best when used as a tool to foster and support human creativity. It makes teams faster and more agile. But it can’t take the place of a skilled social media manager, brand-aware copywriter, or accomplished graphic designer.
11 smart ways to use AI in social media
The AI conversation these days tends to focus on generative AI. That’s the set of tools like ChatGPT that can be used to create content. And, sure, content creation is one of the primary use cases for AI in social media.
But it’s far from the only one. Here, we look at 11 ways to use AI social media tools to enhance your work (and your team’s work) in the social sphere.
1. Analyze and summarize large data sets
Social media produces an almost infinite amount of data – far more than any human could possibly process, let alone analyze.
AI models can help you find the data you need to make informed decisions about your social media strategy. They can turn huge volumes of analytics data into easy-to-understand forecasts that allow you to plan your campaigns based on real data that maximizes ROI. You can get insights into everything from content topic to audience segmentation and demographics to the best time to schedule posts.
AI systems can analyze and summarize internal data sets, too. That includes everything from meeting transcripts to technical whitepapers to collections of notes gathered from multiple stakeholders.
2. Analyze your industry niche and identify strategic gaps
This could potentially be lumped into the tip above, since industry and competitor analysis involves the examination of large and complex datasets. But this is an important enough strategy that we wanted to call it out on its own.
“When a new client signs on, I do industry and audience research using Perplexity Deep Research,” says Brian Gorman, SEO director at Sixth City Marketing. “Then, before I advise on strategy, I analyze the last 6-12 months of social media posts from the client using ChatGPT. This is a great thing to do for competitor analysis as well.”
Analyzing a full year’s worth of social posts would not be possible without AI tools. But using AI, you can identify patterns that help you understand both the big picture and very specific details. AI social listening and sentiment analysis tools like Talkwalker can even help you predict KPIs 90 days out with a high degree of accuracy and spot trends before they hit critical mass.
As you expand your research, you’ll also gain insights from your competitors’ marketing strategies and consumer sentiment that can help you identify strategic gaps in the marketplace. This goes well beyond social media content creation and can loop back to your product development, R&D, and customer support teams.
3. Identify and craft content for specific audience segments
Again, this could be lumped into large data set analysis, but here the key is understanding what the AI tools are telling you and doing the very human work to create targeted social content.
“AI-driven audience segmentation reduced our content planning time by 50% last quarter,” said Ashwin Thapliyal, head of marketing at Exemplifi. “We used it to identify niche buyer personas for a B2B client in the logistics sector, then craft targeted LinkedIn campaigns that drove a 20% increase in lead generation.”
AI is so helpful here because it can take audience segmentation to a far deeper level than tools that don’t incorporate machine learning, providing real insights that help you create content that speaks directly to the needs of potential customers.
You can take personalization even further with the AI tools built into the advertising platforms at many social networks. Rather than creating a single ad campaign for a target audience, these tools serve dynamic ad content personalized in real-time at the individual user level.
“With an SaaS customer, we used AI-driven segmentation in Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and used ChatGPT to make real-time content changes,” says Peter Lewis, chief marketing officer at Strategic Pete.
“Instead of releasing five ad versions, we released hundreds, each of which changed based on the user’s history of interactions,” Lewis said. “If someone watched 75% of a video ad but didn’t click, they got a follow-up with a case study carousel instead of the same video. If they bounced 10 seconds after landing on the site, they got a product demo video with a ‘See It In Action’ CTA.”
For context, more than four million users are now using at least one AI ad tool on Meta platforms, up from one million just six months ago.
Hootsuite’s internal research shows that across platforms, most brands should aim for 48 to 72 posts per week. That’s A LOT of content, and it may seem impossible to come up with that many unique ideas every week.
Of course, with AI tools, you don’t have to come up with that many ideas for social content.
Your organization likely has a well-stocked library of brand content for you to draw from. What that looks like will depend on what kind of company you work for. Maybe it’s a back catalog of highly technical equipment specifications. Maybe it’s a video library of your CEO or CMO speaking at industry conventions.
Whatever form your internal knowledgebase takes, it’s a vast resource for creating social content. AI content creation tools like OwlyWriter AI can analyze an existing document, then turn it into an on-brand social caption (or script for a social video) that meets the specifications of any social platform.
It will even generate hashtags to help get your content seen. Whenever you’re creating a post in Composer, Hootsuite’s AI technology will recommend a custom set of hashtags based on your draft — the tool analyzes both your caption and the images you’ve uploaded to suggest the most relevant tags.
6. Creative brainstorming and idea generation
What if you don’t have an extensive library of brand content? Maybe you’re a new brand, or you’re launching a new product line without existing documentation? Or maybe you just need some ideas to fill in the part of your content calendar that isn’t all about you?
Plug some relevant keywords or general topic categories into an AI tool like OwlyWriter AI to generate fresh ideas for articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and more–all based on what’s trending in your industry.
Tip: We’ve got a free AI blog ideas generator that anyone can use for this purpose — no login or email signup required!
7. Generate alt text
Unfortunately, it can also be easy to ignore, since it’s just not as glamorous as social captions.
If you’re at all hesitant about using AI tools to help draft social content, alt text is a low-risk place to start.
“AI can be super helpful in drafting alt-text for images, even if you’re skeptical about it writing an entire caption” says Hanna Gbordzoe, vice president of social media at Development Counsellors International.
Try using AI tools to create alt text for images in your web content, too.
8. Draft briefs or proofs of concept
There’s often a lot of documentation to create before you even get started drafting posts for a social campaign.
AI tools are great helpers for tasks like writing briefs, outlining a pitch deck, or creating rough copy and graphic concepts to visualize a campaign before getting the copy and graphics pros involved.
This is a great, low-resource way to get feedback and refine your ideas before they go live.
9. Design (or iterate) custom graphics
AI image creation and design tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, DreamStudio, and even Canva can help you create custom, branded visuals in a flash.
For example, Midjourney can create custom images from photos, video clips, GIFs, text overlays, illustrations, and more.
That said, just like you want humans involved in the text creation process, the best results here will involve human graphics professionals too.
Here’s a process that’s worked well for Hootsuite:
- Humans come up with a design concept for a campaign, then use AI tools to create mock-ups
- A graphic designer or photographer creates visual assets for the campaign
- The team uses AI tools to generate additional assets in the same style
- Humans touch-up the assets to make sure they’re perfect
10. Plan and optimize your content calendar
We mentioned above that most brands should be creating 28 to 72 social posts per week. Here’s how that breaks down across platforms:
Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2025
But since much of your audience will follow you on multiple platforms, it’s a real art form to stagger your content for maximum reach and engagement while minimizing viewer fatigue.
Tools like Hootsuite Analytics can be very helpful here, as they use data from your past results based on your preferred metrics to suggest the optimal times for future posts.
“Hootsuite’s AI suggests optimal posting times and themes, trimming our scheduling time by 60%,” said Thapliyal of Exemplifi. “What used to take a full day now takes two hours, allowing our team to redirect energy into strategy.”
Rather than simply answering FAQs with a cookie-cutter response, AI chatbots learn over time, so they are able to answer up to 80% of message replies. Hootsuite’s AI chatbot generates responses based on a pre-approved knowledge base, in your brand voice.
AI chatbots can also operate in multiple languages, and develop specific regional expertise.
5 tips for using AI for social media safely
You might think that brands in heavily regulated industries like government, finance, and healthcare would shy away from AI tools. But the truth is, they’re using AI at even greater levels than the overall social media marketing population.
Organizations in these industries are used to having protocols and procedures in place to protect data privacy, ensure brand safety, and comply with relevant industry regulations and guidelines. That means they’re well set up to use AI tools safely.
Here are some tips brands in any industry can use to mitigate risk and use AI tools safely. Want to dive deeper into this topic? We’ve got a whole blog post on AI compliance to help you out.
1. Understand the source training materials
Your AI output can only be as good as the AI input (i.e., the training materials). Make sure you understand what materials are used to train the AI tools you use. This can help you evaluate how likely your AI tools are to suffer from hallucinations or introduce plagiarism.
For example, Google recently had to re-edit a Super Bowl ad for its own Gemini AI product after the tool vastly overstated the worldwide consumption of Gouda cheese. The problem? According to Jerry Dischler, president of cloud applications at Google, Gemini scraped that data from incorrect data sources on the web,
Dischler claims that’s not a hallucination, but this is quibbling. It’s incorrect data, just not incorrect data that the AI made up out of whole cloth.
Hootsuite’s Social Trends 2025 Report offers the following recommendations for AI source materials and training:
- Try using the same tools repeatedly so your tools learn your style and voice over time
- Supply your company’s style guide to align AI with brand standards and tone
- Provide website and blog content to help with accuracy of promotional messaging
- Specify preferred content formats and structures to maintain consistency
- For AI image generators, upload brand-approved visual elements and photos so they grasp your aesthetic and can generate on-brand variation
With OwlyWriter AI, you’re in full control of the training materials, so your ai content never pulls incorrect information from random sources.
2. Develop your prompt-writing skills
Remember, AI is a tool. It needs proper instructions from you to understand what you want it to do.
Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends Report 2025 offers the following advice for creating prompts that deliver the best AI results:
- Be clear and specific
- Give context about the setting, audience, and tone
- Use examples
- Include requirements such as length, format, and number of variations required
- Tweak your prompts to improve output through several iterations
Want to get more specific? We’ve got a full blog post breaking down sample marketing prompts for ChatGPT to help get the best results.
3. Give humans the final say
AI tools are extremely helpful, but as you’ve already seen. they’re not perfect. They can also still sound like robots. To get the best results, humans need to review and tweak the AI’s output.
“Early tests with fully AI-generated captions for a financial services client saw a 12% drop in engagement,” said Thapliyal of Exemplifi. “The tone felt robotic. Now, we use AI for first drafts but finalize everything with human edits to preserve authenticity.”
Human review is easiest to implement when you incorporate AI tools into existing approval workflows. This is particularly important for industries in the regulated industries. For those brands, Hootsuite’s Proofpoint integration works alongside human reviewers to keep your brand compliant.
4. Establish a data privacy policy
Within your social media policy, dedicate a section to data privacy and security. Make sure you understand very clearly how the AI tools you choose use – and especially store – your data. Ideally you want AI tools that do not access or store your data, or user data, at all.
5. Comply with social networks’ AI guidelines
Many social media platforms have guidelines and standards in place that require users to identify content created with AI. Even if this requirement is not in place, it’s a best practice to clearly label AI-created imagery as an important facet of consumer trust.
Some of the platforms have built-in tools to help you identify AI content, or you can use a hashtag such as #drawnbyAI.
Source: Instagram
What does the future hold for AI in social media?
The vast majority of social marketers are already using AI tools to create, edit, and revise text, as well as for idea generation. Smaller numbers are using AI tools to work with images, although this is the area that saw the greatest growth over the last year.
Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2025
While AI can automate some aspects of social media management, it is no replacement for the creativity and strategic thinking that comes from human social media managers. AI will continue to be used as an aid to help social media teams become more efficient and effective, but we believe humans will always remain at the heart of successful campaigns.
People use social platforms to connect with other people, not with robots. The vast majority of people are uneasy about ads generated with AI. This stat is not specific to social media, and it refers specifically to ads rather than organic content. But it should still give social marketers pause about leaning too heavily into AI for straight-up content and ad generation.
Source: eMarketer
AI will undoubtedly change how social marketers work, just as it will change the nature of work for all creative industries. But human marketers aren’t going anywhere. In fact, 69% of marketers think AI tools can actually create new job opportunities.
Here’s a telling stat. Teams that use AI tools the most also update their social strategy most often. It’s clear evidence that leaning on these tools provides more time and capacity for teams to be agile and strategic.
Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2025
That said, AI deep fakes and misinformation are a real concern. Policies from governments and the social platforms themselves will have to evolve to tackle the darker side of what these powerful tools can do.
For a lighthearted take on this issue, please enjoy this surprising catchy (and well-viewed) ad from the British Columbia Securities Commission. (It’s been running repeatedly on local radio stations, meaning it’s been on repeat in my head throughout the writing of this post. You’re welcome.)
For marketers, the bottom line is to put your audience first. Use AI tools in ways that improve the user experience and bring your brand closer to your social followers, rather than creating a digital divide.
Save real-time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your audience, measure results, and use AI for better content — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.
