AI has quickly become one of the most talked-about tools in marketing for so many reasons. Both good and bad. It can help you write faster, generate ideas on demand and stay consistent across your platforms.
But there’s a problem we’re seeing more and more with small to mid-sized businesses:
They’re using AI…and it shows.
The content feels generic, overwritten, too lengthy or too “designed” without matching the company’s brand or overall feel.
On a platform where trust and ‘being real’ drive engagement, that can be a serious issue.
The good news? You can use AI to your advantage without overusing it.
There are certainly ways that AI can make your social media better and not more robotic by enhancing your voice and not completely replacing it.
Don’t Let AI Do All The Thinking
Some people love it and some people hate it, but regardless of what camp you’re in, AI can spit out a plan, a blog, a caption or an idea in just a few moments. But, it does NOT truly know your business the way you do and it never will.
Your customer’s concerns, the personality of your team, the voice of your business and the quirks of location, what actually happens on your job sites and more cannot be expressed by a machine the same way a human can.
When you allow AI to do all of the thinking from start to finish without your input, edits, changes and general “human-eye”, it will become robotic.
Ways You Can Use AI to Benefit Your Social Media
1. Idea Generation
Sometimes you’re just stuck and you need some ideas. Be overly clear about what kind of ideas you’re looking for and then use that list to springboard even more off-line thought. Your content strategy will be overflowing with posts!
2. Structuring Content
Maybe you have the ideas and possibly a strategy but you’re crunched for time and need to make it more cohesive. Share what you already have going on and AI can give you a quick paragraph or blog that you can move directly to the editing stage of the process. Go from outline to spelled out in a fraction of the time it would normally take you to get it done.
3. Repurposing Content
Pulling snippets from a blog that you have already written to turn them into social worthy blurbs is an excellent way to use the machine to your advantage. Just be sure to re-read and rework those snippets so they sound like and feel like your business. No copying and pasting allowed!
Why do these usually work better than prompting AI to give you a bunch of posts for Instagram? Because you’re starting with your (or your team’s) own ideas and thought processes. When you start with content you already know fits your brand, you won’t stray too far off the path when you accept a little help from AI.
How to Keep Your Content Human
If you want your social media accounts to actually connect with your human audience, it needs to feel real. Like we said above, that starts with what you feed into AI and what you keep in your own voice.
Your best content comes from projects you’ve complete, problems you’ve solved, questions your customers ask every day, community events, etc. Starting with the authentic pictures and experiences from your business and just using AI to spruce up a caption or a subject line or a title will keep your content genuine.
Use AI Results With Care
When AI spits out an overwhelming amount of content, it can be exciting and tempting to do a quick copy and paste. But once you start to read it, you may find the information is not accurate for your area, your company, your industry or it’s not actually achievable.
The content prompts it suggests might not be possible with your small team of employees. Maybe the captions it gives you sound like someone from another planet wrote it. The blog ideas might not align with your business’ values or processes.
Once you get content from AI, you need to:
- Stop
- Read it
- Edit it
- Read it again
- Possibly more edits
- Then proceed with using it
This goes for images, too. The world is having so much fun with AI images. But you just don’t want your social media channels to be filled with AI pictures that truly are not real people, over and over again.
Please keep in mind that using AI does come at a cost. Some studies show that even 20 to 50 questions to a large AI language model can require the equivalent of a 500 ml bottle of water that is used to cool servers that create responses. There are also energy consumption and land destruction factors to consider when you use AI. We encourage you to use it responsibly when needed.
Our process always includes many, many edits to any AI content that is produced. If you need help seeing the value of AI for your Social Strategy or maybe you need support for making your AI messaging sound and look more like you, please reach out. We always consider AI usage and weigh our options when we use it. We’re happy to help you find balance so that you always sound human and real.
