The AI-Social Collision: How AI is Integrating into Social Media

From TURNER's Associate VP of Digital & Social Emma Abbott :

AI isn’t just coming for social media; it’s already embedded in every aspect of the online landscape. From content ideation to audience targeting, artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands and creators operate across platforms. This shift is happening now, and it’s redefining the processes behind effective, scalable, and culturally relevant digital marketing. 

So, what does AI look like in the trenches of social media marketing?  

1. Copy and Ideation 

From writing captions to scripting TikTok's, AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper are powering faster content development cycles. They help to maximize output and efficiency, offering marketers many ways to ideate around copy and ideas. Brand managers must be sure the brand voice is not lost in the AI churn and use it more for ideation riffing/revisions if needed.  

2. AI Visuals Gain Traction 

Midjourney, DALL·E, and Runway are visual tools that continue to make gains in the content space, offering new ways to turn a concept into an image. That said, while AI-generated visuals offer speed and scale, they may not always align with a brand’s values, aesthetic standards, or authenticity expectations, making human oversight critical. Online audiences will become increasingly savvy about AI visuals, and they may not like what they see.  

3. Community Management is Being Augmented 

AI is now powering first-touch engagement in comment sections and DMs. The best move here is not to simply hand over the keys to bots, but to use them to support real human interaction. Important tools like sentiment and smart tagging can help monitor channels for crisis issues, while common question aggregation and AI-flagged comments can help community managers deal more effectively and efficiently with product confusion/preferences.  

4. Paid Media Gets Optimized 

Meta now uses AI at every stage of paid media, from targeting to creative optimization. With tools like Advantage+ and dynamic creative, campaigns automatically test and adjust in real time to drive better results. Instead of manually building ad sets, advertisers provide strong creative and goals, and Meta’s AI handles the rest — maximizing efficiency and scale. 

In the past year, brands and marketers have been overwhelmed with the number of tools and apps available, but the key is to strategically embrace the AI that seamlessly blends a brand’s values and goals with the needs and bandwidth issues they have. Whether it’s content generation, customer engagement, or analytics, the goal isn’t to replace what makes a brand human; it’s to use AI as a way to improve and enhance their online presence.