Streamline your social and digital media content with AI innovation

Generative artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in availability, bringing both opportunity and uncertainty for businesses and marketers. When developing social media and digital content, AI can be an effective tool when properly utilized.

“With social media, AI can be used in the entire process from start to finish,” said SA Senior Social Media Manager Tad Andersen. “AI can be used in idea generation, for copywriting inspiration, image creation, reputation management and publishing too.”

Ways to use AI right now

Generative AI can be utilized through platforms like ChatGPT or Claude. Additionally, there are platforms like Canva and Meta that have added AI tools. As AI rises in prominence, its potential uses expand. It is important to identify what potential uses are ethical and practical for your business.

Andersen sees AI as a helpful tool to summarize long documents, create outlines, generate questions for interviews or assist with A/B testing. He also uses it to summarize social media metrics in an efficient and understandable way.

“AI is a tool that looks at all that messy data and cleans it up,” Andersen said. “There are a lot of different visualizations too, especially in the latest version of ChatGPT, where you can literally just drop a spreadsheet into the chat to almost instantly create graphics summarizing your data.”

Don’t use AI like this

AI is an efficient resource for generating social and digital media content ideas, but never use raw copy from an AI platform as your final product. AI-generated content frequently has flaws and cannot replace human expertise and insights.

“It’s important to use it more as an assistant than to just allow it to write all the copy for you,” Andersen said. “Some people think humans will be replaced by AI, and that is a long way off. At SA, we value original, human-generated and vetted content. We never use anything that comes out of one of those tools in a raw fashion.”

Better audience targeting

Social media is trending toward being able to connect with specific groups of people and have niche conversations with them. Generative AI can be a helpful tool for customizing content for areas where you lack expertise.

“AI offers far better targeting, which ultimately helps the person seeing your organization’s ads,” Andersen said. “Because consumers don’t want to get a bunch of ads that have nothing to do with them. For example, if you have a cat, AI will make sure you see cat ads and not dog ads.”

Don’t forget the human touch

“AI is going to help people do their job faster and, hopefully, with better quality, but it’s not going to replace workers,” Andersen said. “People still want to hear from an actual human and connect with the influencer behind the post.”

AI-generated content can also affect your content’s SEO rankings. Search engines are starting to detect AI-generated content, which results in a lower SEO grade.

“You’re actually hurting yourself by not making sure that the human element’s still in there somewhere,” Andersen said.

Establish company policy

Above all else, it is important to establish company guidelines to ensure consistent, appropriate and ethical AI usage. This standard can range from a policy to specific rules, but it must be understood and consistent companywide. It is also important to transition workers to business AI accounts, rather than allow using personal accounts on these platforms.

“You have to be very specific about how you’re going to use generative AI,” Andersen said. “For instance, our social media team may use AI to help develop copy ideas, but we’re not going to use anything that’s an image or video-based at this point.”

How SA can help

As AI rapidly evolves, new tools are developed and standards shift across industries, it is important to have an expert who can advise you on how to best incorporate AI into your content creation strategies.

At SA, it is a priority to stay up-to-date on new technology. Our agency accomplishes this through an AI taskforce that meets monthly to walk through new developments and how they may be implemented into marketing strategies. It is our goal as an agency to be able to effectively assist clients in managing new developments and use AI in the most efficient way possible.

When it comes to creating efficient, more targeted content with AI, SA has your business covered.

Tad Andersen is Senior Social Media Manager at Strategic America. Learn more about our services.