GenAI can’t feel true empathy, take moral responsibility, apply genuine common sense, create true original meaning, or reason safely in completely novel situations.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— Alan Kay (Computing Pioneer)
AI is rapidly reshaping how social media content is created. What once took hours of brainstorming, writing, and editing can now be done in minutes. Unsurprisingly, marketers and creators are embracing GenAI to produce everything from captions to visuals at scale.
The numbers back it up. Studies estimate that around 70% of social media images are now generated using AI tools, while over half of marketers use GenAI to create social media copy. Yet speed alone doesn’t guarantee quality.
Research also suggests that AI-assisted content, reviewed and refined by humans, performs better than content created solely by people or by AI alone. The takeaway is simple: GenAI works best as a creative assistant, not a replacement.
So, how do you use AI without sacrificing originality, accuracy, or authenticity? Here are the key dos and don’ts of using GenAI for social media.
Many creators worry that using GenAI will make their content sound generic. But you can always get it checked once by a trustworthy AI detector to reduce the risk of getting generic outcomes.
Moreover, some of the functionalities are incredibly impactful to apply in result-driven social media content creation. Five of them are given below.
Brainstorming for content is the most practical and fruitful use of AI assistance. With AI, you can analyse and research a particular topic and even generate a content idea.
Chatbots are great for analysing your competitors’ blogs and social media posts. By doing so, they can find out the ongoing social media trends as well, and suggest that you create content that fits properly with the trend to gather more attention and attract audiences.
For that, all you need to do is consider GenAI as an assistant or a brainstorming partner and keep asking questions. The more you ask questions, the better it will respond.
Not just ideation, but AI tools can also help a great deal in establishing a robust and feasible content outline and structure.
A well-crafted prompt can generate a logical content structure that organizes your ideas into clear sections, making the writing process faster and more focused.
For example, if you want an outline for a 2-minute video script, it will give the outline part by part. It will even describe which section to cover for how many seconds.
So, while each word is originally yours inside the content, the structure given by AI will direct and guide you to organize it and finish it properly.
This is the most impressive use of GenAI platforms. You can input a certain form of content in the prompt and ask it to transform into another format for different purposes.
It is like squeezing the marketing lemon. You simply make it squeeze the zest of the content and refurbish it for another platform.
For example, you can take a podcast or a long-form writing piece and ask AI to make a short copy or tagline out of it to publish on Instagram or LinkedIn.
The quality of AI’s output depends heavily on the quality of your prompt. If your prompt is generic, it will also provide an ordinary response. Proper prompting can get you professional-quality songs for your social media post.
To get the desired response, put as much specification, nuance, and detail as you can. And do not stop conversing after getting the first response. Keep asking for different versions of outcomes.
For example, if you need written content for a carousel post, do not just upload the photos and write the headline. Explain the photos, mention the target audience and ideal customer persona, and explain what perspective you want in that post.
This way, you will get a fresh and detailed first draft of your social media content.
INTERESTING INSIGHT
Structured prompts cut the time to reach a desired final output by 60%.
Above everything, human judgement and review are the last word. It is something non-negotiable, or irreplaceable. It is human oversight that separates a piece from generic AI-created content.
Human oversight, first of all, verifies all the data and information used in the content. Humans can check a particular fact or claim against the source, which AI mostly skips.
Secondly, human oversight always ensures a high standard and quality of the content. Only humans can ensure that the content is ready to fit another human’s expectations and perspectives.
Finally, when humans sit to edit content, they add more value to it by adding real-life lived experiences and human perspective that GenAI cannot do.
More than knowing how to utilize AI, it is more important to learn what not to do while using it. The following points are the common things that most people are habituated to, which need to be avoided.
Posting raw AI output is the most common practice of utilizing GenAI in the content generation flow. We rely too much on AI, so we tend not to review or further develop the outcomes it provides.
To get the exact content that will work, you should revise the output and give a human touch to it.
As we have become habitual of relying on the AI outcomes blindly, we also take the data, factual information, and claims mentioned in the outcomes seriously.
GenAI models can occasionally generate:
This can affect the credibility of our content badly.
So, we must verify every claim and fact we get from an AI outcome while editing it.
Most of us do not think about the privacy and novelty of our own and others’ content, pictures, and information when we put them in the prompts. The moment we hand over these things to AI, we put them at risk of losing security.
AI tends to use the pictures and information we give to train its own functionality, which is seriously concerning.
Also, we sometimes copy and paste our own writing pieces to make them better. Thus, we give away our own creativity and writing style to GenAI for another response to create.
So, we must have a system for data protection and craft our prompts in a way that does not involve our personal information.
Our original ideas are always more valuable and creative than AI-generated ones. No matter how unorthodox or bizarre they may appear, they are always better than others because they make content unique.
But we have a notorious practice of replacing our own thoughts and creative ideas with AI outputs to be safe and conventional, which actually does not work that much.
GenAI has become an invaluable tool for social media creation, but its greatest strength lies in collaboration rather than replacement. AI assistance will save you a lot of time and energy, allowing you to enhance your own creative abilities.
But using it in a basic way will get the same generic responses that do not help to make innovative social media content to attract a maximum audience.
By learning and unlearning the above-mentioned strategies, you can surely get strong and impactful content that will escalate your and your brand’s social media image.
GenAI can’t feel true empathy, take moral responsibility, apply genuine common sense, create true original meaning, or reason safely in completely novel situations.
Never share sensitive information like passwords, credit card details, Social Security numbers, medical records, or proprietary company data with public AI chatbots.
Besides not sharing sensitive data, you are not allowed to break the law or generate harmful content.
