GenAI is powering an always-on social media presence

We spoke with the senior director, head of data and analytics for a leading global consumer company to learn how his team is activating a GenAI strategy to help the company’s brands fully automate and expand the scope of their real-time social media trend analysis and content creation.

Problem

Social media marketing is a critical business activity that is costly, time-consuming and subject to human bias.

In a recent year, social media strategy and content generation cost the company US$500M, with much of that spent on third-party contracts with media and creative agencies.

Solution

The company is now using GenAI to produce and manage much of its brand-focused social media content, including copywriting and creative design previously performed by humans.

The GenAI-powered solution goes beyond replicating tasks typically handled by third-party agencies and marketing personnel—expanding creative, targeted and personalized marketing in ways that are faster, cheaper and more thorough.

“A recent example is the Emmys. Our brands were posting content about the event and related viral moments,” the consumer executive said. “This content was created entirely by GenAI models, picking up some of the trending hashtags, viral clips and news moments, then generating a post when it fit with the brand.”

He continued, “Of course, we have strong moderation because we’re putting content out to the public web. We have a human in the loop who monitors content, as well as systems that use reinforcement learning from human feedback.”

This highlights that—despite GenAI’s impressive capabilities and performance—human engagement is still considered essential to ensure content aligns with brand standards.

Approach

The company built on its already strong data and AI foundation, which included years of experience working with GenAI-related technologies such as natural language processing, cognitive intelligence and multistep reasoning.

Over the past 18 months, it has deeply integrated LLMs and foundation models into its business, focusing on architecture, governance and use case development—balancing build versus buy strategies to maximize impact and value.

The company’s GenAI strategy has been to rapidly expand and prototype. “In 2023, we were throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what stuck: lots of different providers, architectures, models and experimentation types,” the executive said. “But in 2024, a lot of that coalesced into a strategy we’ve now codified and defined.”

“In this case, our [proof of concept] took the shape of a pre-GenAI solution we already had that specifically looked at a social media platform [analyzing trending influencers and brand affinity]. Building on that existing dataset, we focused our initial effort on collecting, cleansing, organizing and structuring the data in real time. We then took the data and threw an LLM on top of it to see what kinds of text content it could generate. Later, we expanded our scope to include hashtags, then a multimodal model that includes images, and now short-form video.”

Results

In the United States, around 60% of the company’s brands are using the GenAI-powered solution to achieve an always-on social media presence and produce relevant content with minimal human involvement. The solution is delivering tangible benefits in three key areas.

First and foremost is increased productivity, which directly translates into substantial cost savings. “Whether it’s a first party, second or third party, there were individuals who were conducting these tasks, and there is a dollar value directly associated with each hour of their time,” the executive said.

Second is increased sales, with the GenAI solution helping to boost both the incremental number of impressions for each social media post and the monetary value created by those impressions (due to heightened awareness, increased purchase conviction, and an easier path to purchase).

The third is reduced media costs, particularly the cost savings that accrue when an effective unpromoted social media post eliminates the need to pay for a promoted post—freeing up budget that can be invested more strategically elsewhere.

Although many of these benefits have had an immediate impact on the company’s bottom line, some of the productivity gains will take longer to fully realize because they require formal process changes or revisions to existing annual or multiyear contracts.

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/consulting/us-state-of-gen-ai-q4.pdf