How AI Could Change Social Media Marketing on Salesforce

With AI featured in what seems like every Salesforce-related news coverage, it’s no surprise that we’re shedding the light on how AI can elevate social media to determine strategic direction, foster human connection, and uncover customer perception. Some sources say that 93% of business leaders agree that social data will be a primary source of business intelligence – while, at the same time, 69% believe that social insights are underutilized. 

This is typically down to a lack of three things: time, integration between systems, and resources (with marketing teams understaffed). Plus, there are paradoxes in play, with automation versus the human touch, and privacy versus personalization. 

These are the constraints and opportunities that vendors are attempting to balance. One of these vendors is Sprout Social, who became Salesforce’s recommended partner for social media management since Salesforce announced their plans to sunset their own product, Social Studio.  

While people may have placed their bets on an acquisition, Sprout Social is becoming stronger each quarter, honing in on their integration with Service Cloud (for social customer care) and Marketing Cloud (for prospect/customer engagement). In looking for more opportunities to support Salesforce customers, Sprout Social has been enhancing its platform with new AI features to give their customers a competitive edge. 

This article will shed light on the impact that AI technologies could have on social media, and what the future of social media management could look like on the Salesforce platform.

Social Media Data vs. Marketing Data 

The importance of data to fuel AI cannot be underestimated. As one Salesforce executive put so clearly: good data + good AI = results, bad data + good AI = garbage. Poor quality or incomplete data is likely to exacerbate an organization’s data problem further by continually feeding inaccurate outputs to users. 

When it comes to social data, however, there are unique challenges: 

• No unique identifier: Without a straightforward unique identifier (like email address in email marketing) matching someone’s social media accounts to a record in CRM is challenging. For one, social profiles are very different across networks, and our social profiles don’t match our names.  
• Personal vs. professional records: Following on from the above, social media is often ‘owned’ by us personally, but yet we leverage those channels for different purposes – including work. Imagine that you could be buying a product or service at your work, and when feeling frustrated, go to Twitter to complain; however, you wouldn’t want your personal Twitter to be associated with your ‘customer’ record in the company’s Salesforce which is associated with your work email.
• No automatic matching: Identity resolution with social data is an interesting topic. What’s the best time to match, and under what circumstances? As we saw above, it can be dangerous to automate matching – and the social networks, who are very concerned about data privacy, certainly wouldn’t like that. How matching is achieved now is on an individual interaction level, that is a service agent/marketer interacting with @mentions, and asking for an email address. This enables the connection between the interaction with Salesforce data. Unless the person has given the information explicitly, there’s a dangerous element of trying to match those up automatically when you don’t know for certain. And it’s likely that it will exist this way for a long time because data is protected by social networks and there’s no exact science to do so.

Salesforce advocates for the “Customer 360”, a unified profile of any individual or account, and their related information. Therefore, Salesforce customers are on the same page in wanting the 360 degree view. The social media profile is a critical piece of the puzzle – if you don’t have that tapped into your omnichannel, one could say that you only have a 270 degree view. 

However, the market leaders in the space have made leaps in building platforms that help to realize the ‘360 degree view of the customer’ vision, with social included.  

For example, with Sprout Social, the integration between social networks, Sprout Social’s platform, and Salesforce Service Cloud/Marketing Cloud enables identity mapping to happen with ‘intentional friction’ – in other words, keeping the ‘human in the loop’. It’s the interaction between the customer and the agent, and the association the agent makes, that drives the connection. Platforms like Sprout make the data feed more accessible, and have optimized the user experience to make this easier. 

To make matters more nuanced, when it comes to Marketing Cloud, how social data ‘hook in’ to the data model is another important point to highlight. In Marketing Cloud there’s very little that’s standard as you make your own data model, using a mind-blogging number of ways to structure attributes, unique identifiers, and audiences.  

The Role of AI in Social Media Management

Like Salesforce, Sprout Social has had AI-powered features within their product for a number of years, for example, their Optimal Send Times feature which recommends the best times to post for each platform. Now, after launching a series of new AI features, called AI assist, Sprout’s customers are able to leverage advancements in AI and LLMs in new ways. 

With this in mind, we were keen to talk with Ryan Barretto, President at Sprout Social, who is well placed to share insight into the role of AI in social media.

Social Content Creation (Including Responses)

Respond faster, respond accurately, and with something valuable. Customers expect a response on social channels in less than 1 hour – and are less forgiving than with traditional channels, such as call centers, email, and websites. 

Social media does need creativity, and obviously, speeding up content creation for the more mundane use cases by using technology like Sprout Social’s to generate suggested replies, as a social media manager you’d be also asking, “How do I make sure that the content that I’m creating is stronger?”. AI-enabled tools will learn from the continued inputs (prompts) and feedback on the output, therefore, getting more accurate over time. 

Sprout’s technology reflects Salesforce’s messaging of keeping the ‘human in the loop’, as social media managers are still required to validate the outputs for accuracy on what they want their brand to portray – now, they will be doing this efficiently, and at scale. 

Determining Optimal Send Times (per individual)

An age-old question that social media managers ask themselves is: “How do I know when the best time to publish is?”. Traditionally, you’d get generalized feedback from tools, such as, “Tuesdays at 3pm”, however, whether that’s the most optimal time is dependent on the audience/s you wish to reach with that message, and their fluctuating behaviors.

Sprout Social’s viral post technology, for example, uses their proprietary LLM (large language model) in the background to take specific information from your audience, and determine when the best time to post is. 

Other Use Cases

• Identify specific target customer segments – and personalize engagement for them. 
• Predict future customer behaviors.
• Optimize pricing and product listings.

As Sprout Social thought about what their customers were needing to do, they realized that with AI, there’s a lot of utility. Plus, platform users access this directly in the flow of work, instead of switching to another app/s. Improving speed, productivity, and efficiency – in other words, they asked how they can make marketers more effective at their jobs.

Social Media With Marketing Cloud: What Could Be Next?

The social media technology space has seen increasing demand as time has gone on. What’s the outlook on the marketplace, generally speaking? 

Lack of New Entrants into the Space

Surprisingly, there have not been many new platforms entering the space (Sprout Social agrees that there have been very few new competitors). 

To explain why barriers to entry into the space are high, Sprout Social reflected back to when they started out 13 years ago:

• There were only a couple of social networks, especially in terms of networks that organizations would use for customer communication. 
• In terms of use cases, it was a push effort from marketing. Organizations were still figuring out how social media marketing works, let alone considering how it could work in relation to the rest of an organization’s tech stack. Not only is there the desire for a 360 degree view, including the social profile, but also tech stacks have become dramatically more complex. 
• Social networks are strengthening data security and privacy, and so are selecting partners that they are confident can take care of customer data. Social media management platforms have to navigate the changing landscape.   

Architecture, Innovation, and Adoption

Sprout Social was founded by four product leaders, who are still at the helm of the company. During development, a number of strategic decisions were made, which have taken Sprout Social to where they are today. 

• Sprout Social has one codebase, and an organically built tech stack (bar two acquisitions, which were subsequently rebuilt into Sprout Social’s core architecture, so that they exist seamlessly in the product). When you use Sprout Social, it’s not legacy software from some other company. 
• Led with the product, including offering trials. Sprout Social considers these critically important to ensure a good product fit for the organization, and by getting prospective customers into the platform, they reduce the risk of customers selecting the wrong product. The trials they offer provide access to even the most sophisticated parts of their product, such as analytics (which they are known to be strong in). 
• While adoption may sound ‘soft’, Sprout Social believes it’s not. Service teams work in a fast-paced environment, and typically experience a fast turnover of agents. Some customers have hundreds of users on Sprout Social, who receive feedback mentioning a high adoption rate due to the interface ease of use, and again, access to this technology is directly in the flow of work, instead of switching to another app/s. 

Sprout’s Roadmap for Social Media Management

• Marketing Cloud Integration: Sprout Social’s latest integration with Marketing Cloud allows customers to access the social data Sprout shares with Salesforce directly in Marketing Cloud.
• AI-powered platform: Which includes a series of new features in beta, including Queries by AI Assist, Suggestions by AI Assist, and Enhance by AI Assist. These features enhance Sprout’s listening, publishing, and engagement solutions. 
• Ongoing roadmap for ‘social customer care’ (Service Cloud → Marketing Cloud): Take Service Cloud data and push it into Marketing Cloud (i.e. audience segments), for use in journeys. Continual enhancements to Service Cloud information, for example, for easier access to iOS and Play reviews that customers have left (a big request from Salesforce customers).

What About Data Cloud? 

Coming back full circle to the start of this guide, identity resolution with social is an interesting topic. What’s the best time to match, and under what circumstances? To respect the parameters around what you can and can’t do with social data, especially in terms of pairing from a mass, automated approach, there needs to be an identifier (not only just email address) that’s shared explicitly by the individual in order to associate CRM records with social profiles appropriately.    

In Sprout Social’s case, they’ve had many conversations regarding Data Cloud internally and with Salesforce, however, they have nothing to announce yet.

Summary 

Social data is a significant source of business intelligence – underutilize social insights, and you could say that you only have a 270 degree view of the customer. Constraints that hinder the effective use of social data include a lack of time, a lack of integration between systems, and a lack of resources. 

The role of AI in social media management ranges from social content creation, determining optimal send times, identifying target customer segments, predicting customer behaviors, and optimizing pricing and product listings.  

Sprout Social has become Salesforce’s recommended partner for social media management, having developed a platform that overcomes most of the challenges, and now, are exploring AI-enabled social media marketing.