Love it, hate it or sit on the fence. Know all the right prompts or don’t really understand it. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived. And it looks like it’s going to be around for a while.
So, should you leverage AI in your social media marketing and if so, how can you do it in an ethical and well-thought-out way? Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Four benefits of using AI for social media
Efficiency
Whether it’s trying to find a great stock image to support your post or coming up with an eye-catching headline, AI can make those tasks easier and quicker, allowing you to do more in less time.
Easier image creation
Finding stock images, particularly ones that are relevant to New Zealand, or creating your own images or graphics can be time-consuming. AI image generation tools make it easier to create images that fit your brand.
Personalisation
AI tools can help you analyse your audience data and look for trends in content consumption or analyse all the reviews your company has to look for areas of satisfaction and what might need improvement. That means you can tailor your content to audience segments or create certain types of content that you know will perform better.
Better customer service
Using AI to create a chatbot system allows you to better answer customer questions either via your website or on social platforms like Facebook Messenger.
Three not-so-good things about AI
Privacy concerns
While AI is still new and evolving there are still concerns and a bit of confusion about how AI tools use the data that is fed into them. That means that there could be privacy issues if you are feeding customer data into an AI tool to analyse it.
Lack of voice
We talk a lot about authenticity in marketing and one of the risks of using AI is that you lose your brand voice and just start sounding like everyone else.
Inaccuracy
Most AI tools are trained on data and information that they are given. That means they are only as good as what goes in. Relying on AI can lead to you getting inaccurate or biased information.
So, should you use AI as part of your social media marketing? Yes. Just like any new tool that is developed, social media marketers should be willing to try out AI and see if they can integrate it into their processes. But (yes there’s a but!). You need to use it carefully. Evaluate the results that any AI tool gives you and make sure it fits with your brand and that your voice is still sounding authentic.
How to use AI authentically
Use it for idea generation
A good starting point for using AI as part of your social media marketing is to use it for idea generation. It can be hard to come up with ideas week after week, month after month, and AI can be your support in that. Use it to generate ideas for:
- Important days throughout the year that you might be able to hang content on
- Topics related to your industry or brand that you could turn into content
- Polls to use on your LinkedIn or Facebook pages
- Captions for images
- Headings and taglines
- The wording of post content
This allows you to generate ideas quicker which gives you more time to spend actually crafting your content.
Put a human edit on everything AI creates
The big red flag when it comes to using AI is letting anything it creates to go into the wild without a human checking it. Use AI as a starting point but put a human eye over it. Check for things like:
- Obvious mistakes in images – current AI image generators seem to have major problems with creating hands!
- Content that isn’t relevant to your country. If you don’t specify a country you may end up with American references that aren’t relevant to us in New Zealand.
- Spelling and grammar – The advice above goes for American spelling too.
- AI-sounding phrases – As AI is used more widely people have started noticing certain phrases or keywords that popular tools like ChatGPT seem to use a lot. Lots of these phrases can make it obvious that you are using AI.
Secondly before you post any AI-generated content you want to edit it to add some personalisation and some brand voice. This stops you sounding just like all the other robots.
Be careful about the data you put in
If you are using AI to look at customer data, ensure that you aren’t entering any details which could identify audience members or any personal information. This reduces the risk of data being seen by random people or being used to train AI models.
AI is developing rapidly so it’s important to keep up with the changes and learn how to utilise each new development to your advantage.
Want to learn more about how to use the latest tools and techniques including AI? Enrol in our Social Media Marketing course for all that and more.
