Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, using generative AI for content creation has been a popular and exciting topic in many marketing disciplines, including social media.
While AI tools clearly have a lot of potential for saving marketers time and resources when filling their content calendars, like any tool, its effectiveness depends on the knowledge and skill of the person using it.
If you’re looking to embrace AI for social media content creation, but want to ensure you’re making the most of this technology, then this post is for you. Here’s five tips to improve your AI-generated content for social media.
1. Choose the Right Tool
When you hear “generative AI” it’s likely that a few big names of the industry immediately jump to mind. However, the world of AI content creation is much more diverse than popular platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, and is made up of countless effective tools that have been purpose-built for specific contexts.
While it’s definitely possible to use an all-purpose generative AI tool like ChatGPT to build great content, this will take a bit of trial and error to figure out the right parameters for an effective brief, such as keeping the content below a certain character limit and including specific keywords in the text.
On the other hand, if you choose to use a tool specifically designed for social media content creation, this will already have been rigorously tested and re-engineered to ensure the responses it provides are always a good fit for the context, and reliably true to the instructions you brief in.
Highperformr offers a suite of free generative AI tools designed for specific functions within the context of social media marketing, such as writing LinkedIn company summaries, Instagram bios, X (Twitter) threads, and more.
By finding a tool that’s expressly built for what you’re going to use it for, you’ll be able to forget about the hassle of prompt engineering, and start creating immediately with a lot of the hard work taken care of.
2. Make Your Prompt Specific
Although anyone who uses generative AI learns this principle pretty quickly, it bears repeating that the more specific you can make a prompt, the better the result will be.
Vague prompts like “write a tweet about an HR tool” will only yield a generic, unclear, and dull response. When you give a tool plenty of context, direction, and constraints on the other hand, you’ll get a result that’s much closer to what you’re looking for.
Some of the specific details to consider including in your prompt might include:
- The target length.
- The target audience.
- The intention of the content.
- Specific details or angles the response should cover.
- Instructions on tone.
There’s no limit to how specific your prompt can be. If you put in the work to write out a detailed brief at this stage, there’ll be less need for revisions after you start generating responses.
3. Ask the Tool to Play a Role
When generative AI was first released to the public, one of the first breakthroughs in effective prompt engineering was the discovery that asking an AI to play a certain role can make the end result much more effective.
Like a kind of reverse buyer persona, telling an AI model to assume the role of a certain fictional character with plenty of details will make it much easier for the AI to understand the context of its task and give you an output that’s fit for purpose.
If, for example, you’re looking to create a LinkedIn post you’re going to use to promote a blog post you’ve just published, you might want to open your prompt with:
“You are John, a tech start-up founder with more than 20- years’ experience in successful SaaS companies, looking to promote use cases for your recently-launched event management tool. Your tone is professional, proactive and helpful.”
By briefing in a specific writer persona, complete with a backstory and the overarching intent for the content brief, you’ll help the tool understand exactly what you’re looking for and teach it to create a stronger first draft.
4. Give the Tool References
Just like a human copywriter, a generative AI tool can often find it easier to write great content when it has “best-in-class” examples to check out, rather than being explicitly told what the content should look like.
Including some stylistic instructions like making the content succinct, exciting, informative, etc, will certainly help bring the tool closer to what you’re looking for. However, if you really want it to give you great content, you should follow this up with a few examples of content that’s performed well in the past.
Before you start using AI for social media content creation, you may want to build up a library of reference pieces, including high-quality content you’ve used in the past for different platforms and purposes, e.g promoting a product, starting a conversation, or sharing a client success story.
Taking inspiration from this content, your AI tool will be much better-equipped to match your brand tone of voice and keep up to your quality standards.
5. Don’t Forget to Check and Revise
Though AI has come a long way over the past couple of years, it’s still not an adequate tool to completely replace human marketers.
Even with the best tools and the most carefully-engineered prompts, AI-generated content can miss the mark in terms of tone and purpose, include facts which turn out to be incorrect, and fall back on certain phrases that are tell-tale signs of unvetted AI content.
If you copy and paste AI responses straight into your content calendar, you’ll be putting yourself at risk of two things.
Firstly, many platforms have sophisticated algorithms that can recognize the hallmarks of generative AI content, and depending on the specific algorithm, this could be marked as spam and hurt the post’s organic visibility. Secondly, if your prompt wasn’t specific or unique enough, and the first draft comes out looking like a lot of other AI-generated content, it could fail to distinguish your brand in user feeds and reduce the rate of engagement.
Make sure that your workflow for AI social media content creation includes a review stage, where you check how well the content has met your goals, and make any tweaks necessary to ensure the finished product is something you’re proud to have attached to your profile.
This way, you’ll be able to benefit from all the efficiency of generative AI, while steering clear of some of the biggest risks.
AI Social Media Content Creation Done Right
Using AI for social media content creation is already helping countless businesses expedite their publishing schedule. However, if you go the extra mile and stick to these best practices, you’ll be able to ensure a higher standard of content and put your brand a step ahead of the competition.
To start exploring the potential of AI content creation and find out what it can do for your social media strategy, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
