How AI is transforming community management

Artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining the paradigms of community management. It provides sophisticated tools for optimising engagement, personalising interactions on social networks, and more. So how do you use AI to manage your online communities? How can you turn AI into an indispensable assistant for managing your online presence? Social media expert Frédéric Foschiani explains.

AI as the community manager's personal assistant

AI can be integrated into every stage of the social network communication process, making each phase more effective thanks to its intervention.

1. Defining your social network strategy

• Targeting : Generative AI saves precious time by helping to precisely define the target persona. It analyses massive amounts of data to create a detailed profile of the target audience, identifying their behaviours and expectations.
• Strategy: Based on this persona, AI will guide us in defining tailor-made strategies, suggesting approaches and content that will resonate most with the target audience.
• Editorial line : Using the persona and the defined strategy, AI helps to design editorial lines that follow the nuances of each social network, while remaining faithful to the brand's overall objectives.

2. Operational management of the community

• Planning : Using insights from data analysis, AI helps to build a personalised editorial calendar for each platform by suggesting relevant formats, ensuring a consistent and strategic presence.
• Content creation : From copywriting to the creation of visuals or videos, generative AI excels at producing engaging and visually captivating content in a matter of moments. This is certainly the best-known aspect of the use of generative AI to date.
• Publication : AI assesses trends and predicts the optimal times to publish based on your subscribers, maximising visibility and engagement. Platforms such as Hootsuite, Agorapulse and Meta Business Suite use AI to recommend the best times to publish to your community. Beware, however, of the potential bias of AI in this respect. As the AI is based on your publication history and analyses your community's engagement, the results will be biased if you always publish at the same time. So think about diversifying the times at which you publish over a long period so that the AI can update its recommendations on the basis of this new history.
• Commitment: AI-based chatbots facilitate real-time interactions, offering fast, personalised responses. This is essential for retaining your customers and attracting new ones.

3. Analysis of results

Using AI to analyse performance enables in-depth understanding and rapid assessment of the strategies in place, providing insights for ongoing adjustments.

The conditions for effective use of generative AI

While AI can assist the community manager at every stage of social network management, its effectiveness will depend on certain conditions. To use generative AI effectively, provide it with detailed and specific instructions. This is known as the "prompt".

Avoid generic prompts, as you'll get generic, biased, incorrect and therefore unusable responses.

The specificity of the prompt guarantees relevant, high-quality results, avoiding generic and often inadequate responses.

On the contrary, to make the most of AI, a well-designed prompt must be precise and include :

• A clear role for AI
• A specific definition of the task
• Clear objectives
• A detailed contextualisation
• Specified constraints and output formats
• An indication of the desired tone

Caution: make any necessary adjustments and add your own personal touch.

Improved visibility and efficiency thanks to AI

Using AI integrated into social networks to improve the impact of organic and sponsored publications

Integrating AI into your social media publishing strategies improves the visibility of your content. The algorithms of social platforms are designed to favour certain types of content based on complex and constantly evolving criteria.

By harnessing AI, community managers can use these algorithms to their advantage.

Optimising sponsored campaigns

When launching sponsored campaigns, the AI analyses the reactions of the target audience and adjusts the parameters in real time to improve the performance of the ads. An initial learning period allows the AI to refine its understanding of the most receptive profiles, optimising the allocation of the advertising budget. In some cases, this learning process can take several days before the campaign is finally launched.

Automated A/B testing

This technique, used for sponsored publications, makes it possible to test different versions of the same publication to identify the most effective. The AI analyses user interactions in real time and adjusts the distribution, favouring the version that generates the most engagement. Meta Business Suite offers this functionality free of charge for organic posts. Think about it!

Examples of generative AI for the creation of visual and textual content

In the field of content creation, generative AI offers innovative and effective solutions.

• Written by :
  • ChatGPT, COPY.AI, Gemini (Google), Perplexity, Copilot (Microsoft), Mistral are examples of AI that make writing easier by generating relevant and engaging content.
• Creation of visuals :
  • Canva and Firefly (part of the Adobe Suite) can be used to create attractive images and elaborate graphics by integrating customised design elements.
  • Midjourney and Ideogram.ai specialise in creating complex, realistic visual works by transforming text descriptions into detailed images. The free version of Ideogram allows you to submit 20 design requests per day, with each request including 4 proposals.

• Video creation :

Videos, animated avatars, synthesised voices... the possibilities are endless.

• Pika Labs.ai, Ai.invideo.io, Synthesia.io and LTX.studio offer video creation capabilities, including text-to-video generation, making it easy to produce video content without the need for actual filming. These solutions offer tools for enhancing and editing existing videos or creating new videos from scratch.
• Heygen allows you to create animated avatars. The best part? One of its functions is to translate a video, reproducing your voice and style for seamless broadcast in other languages. Amazing.

Personalisation and interaction: AI at the service of customer relations

Benefits of AI for managing responses and moderating comments

The use of AI to manage responses and moderate comments will revolutionise the ability to manage interactions on social networks.

Response management

Tools such as ChatGPT can help answer questions, reducing the workload for a community manager or customer service department. To optimise time, it is advisable to create and save an expert prompt, which can then be reused automatically.

In addition, community management platforms are gradually integrating AI to offer responses and help filter out inappropriate or risky comments, thereby improving quality of service and response times while maintaining a common approach to processing.

Comment moderation

AI helps filter out inappropriate or offensive content, ensuring a safer and more welcoming online community. For a number of years now, Facebook has offered an insult filter that allows you to block certain comments before they are published.

In-depth analysis of results thanks to AI

The analytical power of AI to improve your social media strategy

AI offers advanced analytical capabilities that help to understand user behaviour and adjust strategies accordingly.

Community management platforms such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social use AI to provide detailed reports on campaign performance and insights to optimise future actions.

If you don't use these professional platforms, and you're not an Excel expert, you can still benefit from the potential of AI to analyse the results of your organic publications or sponsored campaigns. But to do so, you'll need to spend some time on the prompt, which will detail precisely the type of analysis and output you want.

Example of the use of AI for data analysis

Objective: to measure the impact of a sponsored campaign on organic activity.

Method: extract raw data on organic activity (number of posts, number of impressions, number of engagements).

Define the period to be analysed: Period 1 = pre-campaign week; Period 2 = campaign week; Periods 3 and 4 = post-campaign weeks.

Prompt: ask the AI to classify the results by period, calculate the engagement rate for each period and return the results in the form of a table. Then, using the table, create a graph showing each indicator (posts, impressions, engagement, engagement rate) for each period.

Restitution :

This AI presentation of the data shows the halo effect of a sponsored campaign on organic activity, so you can quickly draw conclusions for your social media presence strategy.

AI challenges for community managers

Ethical challenges

Despite its many advantages, the use of AI presents ethical challenges, particularly in terms of transparency and data confidentiality. It is crucial to ensure that users are informed about the use of AI and that their data is protected.

The integration of AI into certain processes involving the use of customer data must first be the subject of management decisions to put in place the necessary control procedures and guarantee transparency vis-à-vis customers.

Current developments in platforms for transparency in the use of AI

Social networks are working to make the use of AI more transparent.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube... are now asking users to specify whether content published has been created by an AI. This applies in particular to visuals and videos, but remains subject to the author's willingness to report it.

This is why Meta, followed by others, has announced that it plans to train its algorithms to detect content created by AI in order to set up automatic reporting for the purposes of transparency.

How to integrate AI into day-to-day community management operations

To integrate AI effectively, we recommend :

• Be transparent about the use of AI in its publications

• Obtain management approval for the authorised stages in the use of AI

• Train teams in AI tools and how to use them effectively

• Create and save expert prompts for recurring use (writing, referencing, analysis, etc.)

The integration of AI into community management offers significant opportunities to improve efficiency and engagement on social networks while optimising the time needed to devote to certain tasks. However, it is essential to learn how to use AI, manage the ethical challenges and ensure that it is used in a transparent and responsible way. Get trained!