Being a social media manager while using AI is no easy task, especially if you want to sound as authentic as possible. Countless AI models can serve as social media content generators, and many of them are pretty good at doing so.
However, this guide will focus less on choosing those tools and more on how you can make the most out of your current tool(s).
If you want to create engaging content using AI writing for social media posts, this guide is for you.
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Before You Begin
The most important part before you start is to set the proper expectations. AI tools have come a long way and are advancing faster every day. However, as of writing this, AI tools are still not reliable enough to fully generate authentic social media posts on their own.
In other words, we’re yet to get to the “one-click-generation” approach, where you drop your instructions once and expect the AI tool to get it right from the start.
You’ll still have to write a few sentences yourself here and there if you want your social media posts to actually sound authentic. Does this sound a little tedious?
The next best thing is fine-tuning your approach to AI to come as close as possible to human writing.
Note that sometimes it’s faster for you to change a few sentences here and there compared to extreme fine-tuning of the AI to make it generate exactly what you want.
In short, this guide will teach you how to generate a 90% authentic social media post using AI, with the rest of the fine-tuning process left to your discretion.
How to Create Engaging Social Media Content Using AI
In 5 simple steps, here’s how you can make your social media posts as authentic as possible:
Step 1: Find the Most Suitable AI Tool
There’s no single tool that’s considered the best for everyone. Each AI tool has its unique style and vocabulary.
Some might lean toward a more formal tone, while others might generate content that’s light-hearted and casual. This means you’ll need to experiment with a few different options to see which one aligns best with your needs.
Start by exploring a few popular AI tools, taking note of the kind of language and style they use. Test them out by generating sample posts and see which AI writer gives you outputs that resonate most with your brand’s voice.
Over time, you’ll get a better sense of which tool fits your social media strategy best.
Pro tip: A great approach to test out several AI tools is providing them all the same prompt and see what’s best. Do that multiple times over different posts to see which one is more suitable in the long run.
Related: 8 Best AI Tools for Students: Everything from Writing to Coding in One Place
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is crucial when creating engaging social media content. The audience you’re addressing plays a significant role in determining the tone of voice you should use. This tone will vary depending on the nature of your service or product and the platform you’re using.
For example, if you’re reaching out to a younger audience on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, a casual and friendly tone might work best.
This approach makes your content feel more relatable and engaging. On the other hand, platforms like LinkedIn cater to a professional crowd, so your posts there should reflect a more polished and formal tone.
Think about your ideal audience and what they expect from your brand. Tailoring your content to fit their preferences not only helps capture their attention but also builds a stronger connection with them.
Pro tip: It’s perfectly fine to drop a post idea into an AI tool and ask it if it’s suitable for the target audience on that particular platform. Don’t be afraid to ask the AI tool if there’s room for improvement or a better word choice.
Step 3: Create Your Customer Persona
A customer persona is like a cheat sheet for understanding who your ideal customer is. It breaks down key details like age, interests, and what they might be looking for in a product or service. Having this profile in hand makes it easier to create content that catches their attention.
It’s crucial to share this persona with the AI as it can use the persona details to craft messages that fit the tone and style your audience expects. You don’t want your posts to feel generic or off-target, and teaching the AI about your customer persona helps avoid that pitfall.
The closer the AI gets to understanding your audience, the better it will be at mimicking your brand’s voice. This makes your social media posts feel more genuine and less like they came out of a machine.
Pro tip: The AI can help you create or optimize your current customer persona. Feed it information about your brand or service, and ask it what type of audience you think you should target.
Step 4: Establish Word Choice Boundaries
AI tools often default to certain “AI-sounding” words that can make your posts feel less genuine.
Words like “unveiling,” “navigating,” “intricacies,” and “ever-evolving” can be a dead giveaway that a machine, rather than a human, wrote the content. If your goal is to maintain an authentic voice, setting up word choice boundaries is key.
To tackle this, start by creating a list of words that you want to avoid in your social media posts. For example:
Once you have your list, you can include it as part of the prompt you give to the AI. Clearly instruct the AI to avoid these words. You could say, “Generate a post about our new product, but avoid using words like ‘unveiling’ or ‘tapestry.'”
- Unveiling
- Navigating
- Imagine
- Intricacies
- Tapestry
- Ever-evolving
Step 5: Generate in Increments
Generating content in increments can greatly improve the quality of your results. AI tools are great for focused, short-form content, like a concise 200-word social media post that zeroes in on a single topic.
However, if you ask the AI to create a longer piece, say 500+ words, covering multiple topics, the content may become diluted, losing its impact.
To maintain quality, it’s better to break your post ideas into smaller, more manageable sections. For example, if you’re planning a post for various social media platforms, concentrate on one social media channel or topic at a time.
This approach allows the AI to provide richer, more engaging content. Plus, it helps keep your social media strategy more focused, aiding in better audience engagement.
This tactic not only enhances the quality of each generated post but also allows you to better tailor your social media marketing efforts.
You can then piece these smaller content blocks together to suit your posting schedule, ensuring each message aligns with your overall social media content strategy.
Eventually, your AI-generated content will have more relevance and a stronger connection with your target audience.
Optional Step: Teach Your Writing Style to the AI Tool
One effective way to make AI writing for social media posts align with your brand’s tone is to teach the AI your unique style. If you have social media posts or captions that have previously resonated well with your audience, use these as examples for the AI.
You can input these examples and instruct the AI tool to mimic the tone and word choice. This helps ensure the generated content feels authentic and consistent with your brand’s voice.
To streamline this process and avoid repeating it every time you start a new session, consider using browser extensions like Harpa AI.
Harpa AI can help teach your preferred writing style to the AI on a more permanent basis, allowing your social media content generator to consistently produce posts that reflect your established tone.
This saves time and helps maintain a cohesive voice across various social media platforms, enhancing the effectiveness of your social media management efforts.
Optional Step: Generate Ideas and Headings Using the AI tool
AI tools are an excellent resource for brainstorming new post ideas and creating engaging content for your social media channels.
If you’re feeling stuck or experiencing writer’s block, an AI-powered tool can serve as your creative partner, generating fresh content ideas that align with current trends.
You can use your AI assistant to brainstorm catchy captions, develop content strategies, or even come up with new topics for your next social media post.
Whether you want to spice up your Instagram captions or need inspiration for Twitter threads, leveraging AI features can help streamline your content creation process.
These tools can also assist in generating headings and subheadings that capture attention, making your posts more appealing across different platforms.
Integrating AI into your social media management allows you to have a constant source of inspiration, ensuring your social media marketing efforts remain dynamic and engaging. An AI-powered social media content management platform can further streamline this process by combining content generation with scheduling and team collaboration.
Additional Tips and Tricks That Nobody Tells You
These tips are optional and aren’t a “must.” If you use the steps we mentioned earlier, you can turn your AI into a reliable social media post generator. However, if you want to stand out, have a look at these refined tricks:
1. Spot Redundancies
A lesser-known fact about AI is that it uses the “why change what works?” concept. If you monitor your generations long enough, you’ll notice a pattern of words, phrasing styles, and formatting that can get repetitive quickly.
For example, Chat GPT is notorious for ending its generations with something like “By applying the steps mentioned above, you can ensure that your work is of better quality.”
On the other hand, Claude is famous for repeatedly using the phrase “For instance” in an almost annoying manner.
Another example is Google’s Gemini, which overuses bullet points and lists so much that even regular usage of bullets in human writing is now flagged as AI content by detectors.
As such, develop the habit of noticing the patterns of your chosen AI tool and further refine your prompts to avoid such redundancies.
A good example prompt for Chat GPT is as follows: “Please don’t start any sentence using the words (by) or (whether) as they are AI-ish and can sound redundant.”
2. Observe the Working Method of Your AI
AI language models process prompts differently. For example, Chat GPT and Claude read the entire chat every time you send a new message, which is why their generations tend to be cohesive.
However, they do fall flat if the chat gets too long because they get overwhelmed with the text, which is why you should always start a new chat per post/topic.
On the other hand, Google Gemini tends to process each message individually, which is why an instruction that you may have put at the beginning of the chat can get ignored entirely a few messages later.
We also have Perplexity, another AI language model that uses a mixture between the previous two approaches to keep the generations somewhat cohesive but, at the same time, avoids loading its own memory to keep your content more concise.
You’ll notice all of these tips by using a particular tool prolongedly, so don’t get discouraged if you fail to notice that in the first few days.
3. Be Careful of the Most Recent Information
Some topics (like soccer and electronics) get updated ridiculously fast, and not every AI has the most recent knowledge base. To stay relevant to the most recent data, you have two options:
- Know the most important data yourself so you can spot any inaccurate or outdated information provided by AI.
- Use AI generators that have internet access, like GPT-4o and Perplexity.
Note: Even if you prefer the second method, we highly recommend having basic knowledge about whatever topic you’re generating. It’s not uncommon for the AI to browse an outdated website.
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4. Utilize the Power of Images
If you have an image of a product that you want to describe for your social media post, you can upload it into some language models like GPT-4o or Claude.
The free subscription allows you to upload a few images per day, but their ability to describe images of various types is highly accurate.
You can refine their image description using any of the tips we provided in this post. AI can also be your social media caption generator because it can effortlessly provide social media captions.
Additionally, some tools like Gemini provide free image generators for those who want original images. Gemini’s imagen 3 is still rough around the edges, and the free subscription struggles to generate pictures of people or text, but it will do a decent job for anything else.
Final Words
As you can see, there are countless approaches to refining your social media content creation using AI. However, AI models are yet to become fully capable social media post generators, which is why your human intervention remains a must.
The quality of your prompts can reduce your input to the minimum, but never zero. How “minimal” will that be is up to your own skills, the prompts you use, and the tool you choose.
Also, be careful not to spend too much time trying to over-refine your prompts, especially if you can quickly edit out the few mistakes in the post.
After all, the whole point of using AI is to save time, not overcomplicate things or force the AI to do all the work itself.
