Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is the hottest topic in almost any industry now. In this post, I will discuss some of the A.I. tools that help in solving direct pain points in the online news/publishing industry.
What I would list first are time saving tools – specifically tools that complete tasks automatically carried out by computers & algorithms. These tools can do the job as effectively as a human nowadays, and yet we still depend on editors to do them manually. A good example is tagging articles. I can safely say that no one likes the process of tagging articles & posts. Happily, there are tons of systems that can complete this task with comparable accuracy – if not better in many cases. Another example is picking out related articles or stories. It is such a simple task, yet most editors still prefer to choose their own since the technology used at their company is not good enough. But that simply doesn’t mean that such technologies with high accuracy don’t exist.
The second type of tool is the intelligence ones which give you deeper insights than what you can deduct by looking at a Google Analytics report. For example, answering questions such as: “what would intrigue my readers more: mentioning Donald Trump in the title or Theresa May?”, “would an article about a recent Kobe Bryant investment be interesting to my audience?”. To answer such questions without the right tools would be crazy. It would be very time-consuming and you might end up with the wrong results. But with Smart tools that rely on Artificial Intelligence, you can get accurate answers in seconds. The tools help you in understanding your audience’s current habits and predict what would work in the future – or at least help you plan how to change that fact.
The third type of tool is profiling. These tools track your website visitors, understand what they like individually, and suggest which content they would prefer to view next from your produced content. Personalization of user experience is a must these days – not just an optional cool feature you can decide to add or not.
The fourth set of tools relates to automated audience acquisition. Two examples are: automated personalized newsletters, and automatically generated Topic Pages.
Newsletters are one of the best tools for acquiring loyal visitors and for generating fresh views on a daily basis. I can’t stress enough the importance and ROI of using Artificial Intelligence personalization algorithms to automate this process. Basically, these algorithms will work on your behalf and yield better results than sending generic (or many niche) newsletters yourself.
Topic Pages, on the other hand, are pages that list all the content about a single subject you wrote about previously. For example: a Hurricane Micheal page, or a Anthony Scaramucci page, etc. Such pages can be easily created automatically using Artificial Intelligence algorithms that identify topics and score their importance in context. After all, you don’t want to list every article that mentions Apple iPhone on the Apple topic page. Such pages are ranked highly by Google search based on the inter-linking factor between the original content page and this aggregated page, the URL path, and the way the page is tagged in its source code.
This is just a sample of the many Artificial Intelligence tools you can use for Audience Acquisition and Engagement. Are you using A.I. in another way? Talk to us on Twitter.