As generative AI becomes standard across marketing, the competitive advantage is no longer access to the technology. It’s knowing where automation strengthens a brand and where it quietly erodes trust.
Last week in our Pool Party newsletter, we shared results of a Pangram study showing that 25% of all longform content on social media is fully AI generated.
There’s no question brands are using A.I. around their social media marketing. The more active question is how brands can do a better job of using A.I. to improve social media performance.
Research shows there’s largely a tradeoff between efficiency and authenticity when using A.I. tools on social media. You can create more content and at a faster rate, but if the tone is too similar, impersonal, and more to the point reads like A.I. – you’re going to start losing your audience.
For example, in 2024 the Chinese social media platform Weibo offered top influencers a new feature where an A.I. agent would automatically generate replies from the influencer’s account. Research found if the AI agent responded too fast, like in a second, users would assume it’s an automatically generated response. However, if the agent waited too long the conversation would move on without them. To be effective the AI bot needed to write in the voice of the influencer, and respond in the same time window’s a human would.
While A.I. can in the right circumstances improve social media engagement, relying on it too much will be a turn off for the audience and result in ineffective and off-brand messaging. A.I. is a tool to help you generate your own content, not a substitute for a human created point of view. It can help you detect mistakes, in research, data analysis and drafting but ultimately the content has to be vetted by a human and reflect the opinions and values of marketers and the brands they represent.
To help navigate this very nuanced topic, here are some dos and don’ts around using A.I on social media.
Do’s
- Consider disclosing when you’re using A.I. on social media. It’s a trade off, while A.I. is most effective on social media when people don’t know it’s being used, they don’t want to be tricked either.
- Use A.I. to evaluate social media performance. A.I. is better at detecting existing patterns than predicting what new ideas will connect with the audience in the future. A.I. can be helpful in surfacing actionable insights in scheduling optimization, and figuring out what type of headlines or images you’re already posting are performing the best. New tactics still need to come from humans.
- Use A.I. to come up with topic ideas to write about, for humans to iterate on. In terms of overcoming writer’s block, artificial intelligence is a great tool for generating jumping off points to flesh out further.
- Utilize A. I. for fact gathering, just not fact checking. At this point there’s very little difference between doing research on Google and ChatGPT, especially as Google Search provides A.I. generated answers as well. However, just like with any type of research, the findings need to be vetted and double checked by humans.
- Manually check A.I. generated closed captions on video content. Automatically generated closed captions are a great time saver, however mistakes are still inevitable. An actual employee should still spellcheck and edit the output.
- Use A.I. to correct basic grammatical mistakes and improve content readability for social media posts. Most people make pretty small mistakes in writing copy that can easily be fixed using A.I.. As always though, reread and edit the A.I. version, as algorithms aren’t immune from mistakes either.
Dont’s
- Avoid using automated A.I. to respond to negative posts on social media. The user is already upset with your brand and they’re likely to get even more upset if it’s not even a human responding to them.
- Understand generative A.I. can only remix things that have already been said. If you want your brand to be a thought leader and not a thought follower, you need to be very judicious about how you use A.I. in communicating on social media.
- Recognize that plagiarism is plagiarism if it’s done by a human or an algorithm. Make sure other people’s content is being referred to as a cited source and not taken wholesale or without credit.
Final Thought:
The key to using A.I. on social media successfully, is recognizing that it’s a tool to help your brand become more efficient at social media, not a solution to replace human effort or decision making. One framework to keep in mind is the 70/30 Rule, which theorizes that about 70% of many people’s jobs are mundane repetitive tasks, while the other 30% requires human expertise and decision making.
Use A.I. to assist with some of the repetitive tasks around social media, such as research and evaluating the successfulness of your content strategy; giving social media marketers more time to focus on actual strategy and creativity.
