Adopting to change and harnessing the potential of AI for social media and content writing
There’s been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence (AI) recently. Especially in the form of doomsday predictions about how everyone would lose their jobs, since AI can now write lengthy letters that no one will read. Of course, some jobs are at stake, but the future is more about adaptation than disintegration, just as it was with previous economy-redefining innovations. Just as the industrial revolution made craftsmen redundant by making tasks easier, it also opened the way up for a period of rapid employment expansion. Which in turn led to greater wealth and greater demand, rocketing us forward into the consumer la-la-land that we live in today.
My last blog on AI was focused more on the economic impact of the new AI models. This one will focus more on how those of us working in social media and marketing can use AI to get ahead and be secure in our careers. Adaptation, my friends.
In this segment, I’ll focus how we can use AI as an aid in the writing process, primarily ChatGPT and Bing. In the next installment, we’ll cover graphics design (another industry that is most definitely not going away, at least not yet 😉 ).
Can’t AI do a lot of this stuff for us?
A quick note. Yes and no. Not the free stuff for sure. Free stuff still requires a lot of “prompt engineering” to be useful, even with the most advanced GPT4.
The paid services, on the other hand, are often tied to murky, “personalized” pay schemes since standards haven’t really been set yet. I sat down to test a few out as part of my preliminary research for this blog but was unable to do so due to the prevalence of suspicious paywalls. And I don’t feel comfortable linking or suggesting any, precisely because of that. There should at least be toned-down trial versions. Of course, it could just be, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it”, meaning it’s geared towards larger corporations rather than small businesses, which is fine.
Where free versions existed, like with Quillbot, they were not “writer bots” but rather served as writing aids. And I will happily suggest Quillbot as it is very useful for paraphrasing and for generating fresh ideas on how to rephrase a given statement. It has also become an indispensable tool in my editing workflow. I might add that this is my own opinion, and not any kind of endorsement from Smartsound.
All that to say: AI still desperately needs human intervention. Even when it’s writing articles for us (generally a bad idea), it still needs a human to check the work for readability and make sure it’s not an all-out boring, lifeless read like one of those AI voices they’re trying to pawn off on us. Oh, and also to make sure that it’s not hallucinating (see below).
The fails of AI chatbots
AI chatbots aren’t perfect, and they’ve a long way to go before replacing people. Even as we use them, they take time and attention to make sure they’re not doing the task incorrectly, and the humans using them also need to understand how they work to get good results.
1. It’s a bad content writer
Of course, as a content writer, I’d say that. But I’m being honest here.
I would venture to say it’s okay to have AI write your social media posts, especially if you’re writing lots of them or have general writer’s block. But with especially the longer form content, it can become quite clear that an AI wrote it. The writing is inevitably cold and lifeless and full of formulaic text and dated cliches – which can also be the fault of non-native speaker or just someone bad at writing. As an English teacher, I even teach to use a lot of “plug-and-chug” formulas to get down the grammar and conversation, but in written text it can become annoying to read (not to say there aren’t a lot of brilliant non-native English-speaking English content writers out there!).
Another danger with long-form writing is that AI operates on “tokens”, which is a bit like your short-term memory. Once it runs out of tokens, it has to reset, which means it begins to “forget” what it’s written before. It’s like hiring someone with dementia to write your master’s thesis. Probably not the best idea.
2. Time sensitive information
Even the latest ChatGPT and iterations of it do not have access to the Internet, except obviously in relation to its user. So it’s utterly useless for any time-sensitive information, like current events in the news. Even the chatbot tied to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a block on current crises and topics. Though it is updated commonly, you can never be sure when. This is important to keep in mind, as the bots might tell you “current” information, but it’s actually a few months or even years old. Think of it like wikipedia, the more aged the info, the more accurate. But remember that the “wikipedia” it’s using is dated a year or two ago.
For social media folks, this is especially important to know regarding SEO use. Hashtags that AI can give you aren’t likely to be the current hot ones, and they are useless to look at how a page is doing on Search Engine Page Results (SERPs), as well as finding out currently popular keywords. There are many tools out there that can find this information though, like Google Analytics, but at this point, the popular free AI chatbots are unable to do this.
3. Hallucinations
Because of chatbots only being able to access information to a certain point, and because of its general inability to tell fact from fiction – like humans, it has a very limited ability to discern facts in the news and blogs and what to give more weight to – AI are prone to what experts call “hallucinations”. This is when the AI appears to be just making stuff up, but giving it to you as facts. Sure, it thinks they’re facts, but they’re not.
Prompting
Now that we’ve got the caveats out of the way, it’s time to discuss how to use the AI chatbots for our own good. And this takes some “prompt engineering” or “prompt sculpting” as I like to call it. If you’re attempting to talk to ChatGPT or Bing like a human, you won’t get the best results (though you can certainly go down some odd rabbit holes). There is no need to say “please” or “thank you”, though oddly that’s often a reply the Bing bot suggests.
So here are some more tips to get you started with your AI-aided social media journey:
1. Prompt-sculpting
Remember these key concepts: Role, Result, Context, Goal, and Constraint. The most productive prompts use those five things, with as much additional information as possible. For social media, to get good results to help you write a tweet, for example, you could write, “As a social media content writer, write a tweet summarizing the following text for the second tweet of an ad campaign, including information about the ongoing 30% off sale valid from April 3-6, limit 90 words and include three hashtags, and here is the product description” (I know I said it’s bad at current hashtags, but for some industries, time-tested hashtags can still be relevant).
- In my example, we have the Role, “As a social media content writer”. Always assign the chatbot a role to get a more catered tone. “As a research specialist”, “As a drill sergeant”, and so on. Of course, the text produced will be very stereotypical, but that’s where the skills of a good writer/editor come in handy.
- The Result included was a “tweet”. Include what you want the text to be. A “YouTube video description”, an “opening line”, anything to tell it what it’s writing.
- Context can often be tied up in Result. If you’re doing an ad campaign with a series of 4 tweets, you’ll want it to know which tweet in the series it’s writing, if there’s a sale, then what are the details of the sale, and so on. It needs as many details as possible to give you the best result. This is where many people go wrong, thinking the AI is a magical, mind-reading application. It’s not.
- Include any constraints, like word/character limits, and so on. There is always a danger that it will go on and on and on and you’ll be forced to use that “stop generating” button. Which is obviously completely useless for a tweet.
2. Regeneration
Keep in mind that in all the chatbots, ChatGPT4, Bing, etc. you can always get variations on the answer, or “regenerations”. Feel free to try this as many times as you’d like until you start getting repeats. Maybe something will strike your fancy.
3. Follow up questions
Tone in your text. If you don’t like the outcome, add additional constraints or instructions. “Again, but funnier with more metaphors,” “Again, but make it longer.” “Flesh it out.”
4. Train the AI
If you’re looking for a specific kind of answer, or a specific way you want it answered (especially regarding logic puzzles), you’ll need to “train” it with a few examples – questions and answers – first, and then you can ask your questions.
5. Adjectives
Use lots of adjectives. Where there’s a noun, throw in a descriptive adjective. Is your campaign “exciting”, or should it be more “formal”? Is your audience “youthful” or “elderly”? Should it use slang, should it include a lot of metaphors? Let it know!
Strategy
Now that you have some idea on how to carve out your prompts, it’s time to give you some ideas on more general ways to use AI to advance your strategy.
1. Identify the audience of your product
Tell the AI about your project, then ask “What is my target audience?” The likely way it will find this information is to look over your direct competitors and see their audience. Remember, the answer will be valid for last year. That said, it should still be relevant.
2. Enhance visual content
Ask it for suggestions on brand colors, matching colors, etc. “I like #000234 for my main brand color, what are some good complementary colors? My brand makes music for commercials and video games. It’s exciting and youthful.”
3. Help with regex
Regex are “regular expressions” in Google Analytics. Just ask it straight: “What are some regular expressions to show matches that contain…” Again, the more specific the question, the more specific the result. Copy this into your Search Console’s query, and you can see the keywords that have been working for you, for example. Note, you’re not asking the AI for keywords directly, but it can help you find them.
4. Generate hashtags and captions for social media posts
You must keep in mind that big caveat I mentioned earlier. Since current AI do not have access to the Internet, they can’t tell you the hashtags that are trending today. But if you’re looking for some general hashtags that are consistently popular for one subject or another, it can help you there. It can also help you with your caption or headline text. Just copy your blog in and ask, “Give me 10 click worthy headlines for this article.” Always ask for a list to choose from and build from there.
5. Assist in your research
As long as you’re not researching anything new, of course. Bing, in my opinion, is the superior research partner here. When Bing provides search results, it also gives you links to where it got that information from. It’s like a “smart Wikipedia”. You can then follow those links and see if they will lead you anywhere else or if they’re accurate themselves.
6. Be a brainstorm partner
Ask it for lists. “Give me 10 popular topics on music theory.” From there, ask follow up questions, “Tell me 10 interesting facts about the number 4.” Keep on going with rabbit holes and follow ups and find all the weird and unusual places you can go with such trains of thought. This can help you come up with new ideas for blogs, focus your listicles, and so on.
Likewise, when you’ve run into a writer’s block, you can ask it to write the article for you. Then look at the direction it goes, and see if there’s something you can borrow there. Often, longer articles will be cold gibberish of something only vaguely human, akin to Midjourney’s fingers.
7. Use AI-powered tools to help you write short-form ad copy
I’ve mentioned this above. Be sure to write, “As a social media content writer”, “As a comedian”, “As an expert”, to craft an appropriate voice for your brand, and also what platform you want content for, be it Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on. You’ll still need to make sure that it’s relevant to what it’s advertising and if it’s good. Being an AI means it has no natural sense of humor or political correctness filter also.
8. Define words or get synonyms
Ask it for definitions, synonyms, sentence examples, etymology, and so on. You could of course, open a dictionary website for that, but then you’d have to open more tabs.
9. Paraphrase your doc
Ask it to rewrite your content. Of course, you need to include descriptions regarding how you want it rewritten. “Funny, serious, as an expert, as a first-year student”, etc. You can also ask it to shorten the text or lengthen it, or make it fit an exact amount of words.
If you don’t like the result, then keep regenerating the text until it spits out something you can work with.
10. Get feedback
Copy your text and write, “As a critic, review this text and make a list of good points and bad points and how it can be improved for publishing as a blog/short story/scientific journal article”. You can actually get some decent pointers this way, without ruining your ego (as long as you write the “good points” part of my prompt. Be more specific in the aims of your content to get better, more constructive feedback.
11. Format documents in various standards
If you’re not sure about the format or structure that a formal document should be in, ask it for the outline. Likewise, you can ask it to “Rewrite this text and citations using MLA standards, and then tell me what you changed.” Or just take a citation that you have and ask it to rewrite it using whatever standards you need.
12. Extract information
Get the tl;dr of some text by copying it into the chat AI and asking some basic questions: “Based on this text, when… what… where…”
13. Write html, Javascript, etc.
This works best if you already know a bit of coding yourself, or at least how programming languages work. And again, the more information you give it, the more quality code you will receive.
14. Create click-baity titles
I hate creating titles. I’m often ashamed of them the more “click-baity” they are, even knowing that’s probably an article that is going to do better. So having a chat AI come up with one for me is a bit less terrible in my mind. “I didn’t create it, ChatGPT did!” We all need our copes, right? So: “Create clickworthy title for this article…”and copy in the text.
Just so you know, the title of this article, for instance, was made by ChatGPT.
15. Create quick outlines
You can also ask chat AIs to create outlines of text for you. This is true for older websites and books. Which means “The Idiot’s Guide to…” book series might find themselves out of business soon! Try: “Write an outline for Midsummer Night’s Dream”, for example.
As a content creator, creating outlines of other people’s work can be a massively helpful learning tool. With an outline, you can see how the basic story or content is structured. Learn from how the winner’s structure their creations and see what you can borrow from that structure.
16. Write meta-descriptions
For social media, meta-descriptions are some of the most innocuous tasks, but they are extremely important for indexing your pages (this is the text that appears in search engine results, if you didn’t know). The tediousness of the task can often lead to writer’s block (especially for me), but this isn’t the case with chat AIs. You can’t get any results from ChatGPT, because it can’t look things up on the Internet, but that’s not the case with Bing, who is only limited by date (it can’t look up recent things, but stuff that’s about a year old).
Just type: “write a meta-description for cloud.smartsound.com”, for example. The result isn’t bad, though I think it just used the text I wrote last year, but fair enough.
17. Proof-read
The free chatbots aren’t the best tools for proofreading, but they’re tools. You’ll have to copy and paste whatever you want proofread, and ask it to “Proofread this”. The disadvantage here is that the reply will include all the changes, but it won’t point out what it changed. For this it’s better to use Word, Grammarly, or Quillbot, which actually shows you what it suggests changing.
18. Improve clarity
The same goes with asking a chat AI to paraphrase something, you just have to give it a paragraph and ask it to “rewrite and make it simpler” or “rewrite and improve clarity”. Remember that the more precise you are in your description of what you want, the more likely it can get the exact tone that you’re looking for.
Sum up
This isn’t everything that AI chatbots can do for you. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But by now you should be able to see how this will turn into an invaluable resource for content writers and others. It’s unlikely to replace the job, but it is likely to help millions improve their skills, and will most definitely make the market more competitive. But with increased competition, hopefully that means better stuff will rise to the top.
Hopefully.
