AI Comes to the Rescue of APAC Social Media Teams

Social media is more crucial than ever for businesses in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, but teams are grappling with shrinking budgets and staff shortages. A new report from Meltwater reveals that over half of APAC companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to supercharge their social strategies.

The State of Social Media 2024 report found that 55% of APAC businesses consider AI vital for their social media programs, significantly higher than the global average of 44%. This trend is driven by AI's potential to streamline content creation, enhance copywriting, and amplify reach with limited resources.

The AI advantage

64% of APAC respondents reported using AI tools to save time on content writing, while 36% credited AI for improving their copy quality. However, despite the growing reliance on AI, many teams still face challenges in defining and executing effective social media strategies.

“Social media teams are in an unenviable position of doing a lot more for their organizations this year with limited resources and budget," says Mimrah Mahmood, vice president for enterprise (APAC) and partner at Meltwater Asia-Pacific. “Concerningly, not having a defined social media strategy is a more prominent challenge in APAC than other regions.”

Although nearly half of APAC teams anticipate social media playing a bigger role in their companies this year, many struggle to maximize their social programs due to reduced resources. The survey reveals that even large corporations often have small social media teams of just 2 to 5 members. Additionally, 34% of respondents are still working on defining a social media strategy, while a quarter lack the resources to execute existing strategies.

The AI revolution

Meltwater's ChatGPT-powered writing assistant is just one example of how AI is transforming social media marketing. With AI-powered image generators and text-to-video models on the horizon, the future of social media content creation is set to be even more automated and efficient.

“While the usage of AI is currently centered around finding inspiration and creating copy, we can expect greater usage of AI to further boost content creation as text-to-image and text-to-video AI models improve and become mainstream,” Mahmood observed.

As AI continues to evolve, APAC social media teams are poised to leverage its potential to overcome resource limitations and deliver impactful social media campaigns.

Image credit: iStockphoto/RomoloTavani