Using ChatGPT in social media marketing

ChatGPT has recently taken the digital world by storm. This powerful text-based AI platform gained a million users in the short space of five days, bringing up a whirlwind of questions over the future of search platforms, digital marketing, and everyday life.

Also known as a ‘generative AI’, ChatGPT generates conversational text replies to your queries. It’s also being integrated into Bing, while Google has launched it’s own version called Bard.

At Edge45, our AI Content Generation team has been researching and experimenting with the tool to figure out how ChatGPT can help create a strong social media marketing plan for your business.

Like any online tool, it needs to be used correctly. And when used by experts, ChatGPT can be an excellent addition to your social media toolbox. The trick is in knowing the best way to wield it, so you get the results you’re looking for.

Article summary:

• AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are great for planning and research
• Tools like ChatGPT aren’t great at creating original and engaging content
• We suggest using ChatGPT and similar tools to deep dive into key topics

Ways to use ChatGPT in social media marketing

Some of our favourite ways to use ChatGPT for social media include:

• Idea generation – Ask ChatGPT to provide you with content ideas for your brand. Give it some context on your business and be specific about what you’d like the content to do (inform, entertain, improve conversions, engage current customers, etc), then see what it comes up with.

• Expand content – Once you have a basic idea you like, you can ask ChatGPT to expand on the concept by providing a list of specific suggestions for images, videos (both long- or short-form), Twitter threads and podcast episodes you could create around that particular subject.

• Summarise content – Ask ChatGPT to shorten existing long-form content, such as blog posts or website guides, into a list of tweets, LinkedIn posts and/or Instagram captions. These can (and should) be rewritten by humans, but it’s a great starting point for you to work from.

• Formatting and analysing data – Input streams of data into ChatGPT and let it analyse and format it in a way that makes it easy for you to read and understand. This is a very helpful way to get an in-depth look at your social media analytics, for instance.

• Competitor analysis – Ask it to provide URLs for a list of competitor social channels. This provides you with a quick spreadsheet to start tracking competitor’s activity.

Getting most from ChatGPT

ChatGPT can be an incredibly useful research tool – but it does have its limitations and caveats. While, it’s great for research, with the wrong inputs the outputs can be underwhelming or miss the mark.

This means knowing how to use it is vital to make the most of this hugely powerful tool. At Edge45, we’ve set up a team to do just that. We are training our content team to become AI experts and integrate it into our workflows to make us more efficient in producing high quality, highly relevant content.

We know when to use it and, vitally, when not to use it. Here are some tips we’ve discover along the way:

• Educate yourself and your social media team on the platform’s restrictions, pitfalls and possibilities.
• Experiment and explore how the tool could best improve your own personal workflow.
• Research how to write detailed prompts that get you the answers you’re looking for. This is called Prompt Engineering and will be an important skill to have as AI is integrated further into our lives.
• Fact-check and proofread any AI-generated content. Make sure you double check all data provided by ChatGPT. You don’t want to lose your customer’s trust in your brand by sharing misinformation.

The future of humans in an AI-world

Artificial Intelligence isn’t going to go away. As the technology evolves, we suspect it will become more and more integrated in both our work and our everyday lives – so it’s smart to start learning how to use it now.

Successful content marketing – including social media, strategy, and copywriting in general – requires creativity, originality and empathy. Here, we combine these human elements with AI content to produce something truly unique.

What next?

Contact us to discuss your social media, content marketing and SEO needs. If you’re interested in using AI for content generation on your website, we can help you to wield this powerful tool.