02 Aug Generative AI for Social Media Marketing: What Are the Opportunities and Limits?
Generated by Dall-e AI
Generative AI is defined as artificial intelligence that is used to create something. Generative AI has recently rocked the marketing industry, with our own SocialCraft.ai tool, to blog posts from Jasper.ai to photos from Midjourney, to now ChatGPT taking over everywhere.
Suddenly, people from all industries are truly seeing how powerful this technology is. And initially, it can be pretty concerning. Copywriters and designers wondered if they’d still have a job in the coming months.
But now that we’ve had more time to understand it, there are some strong benefits to using this generative AI technology as a social media agency. Our team recently sat down to discuss our thoughts on this.
If you prefer to read along, we’ve summarized many of the highlights of the discussion in this post, covering the opportunities and challenges that generative AI creates, and where we think the future of social media marketing and AI will take us.
Will Generative AI Take Social Media Jobs?
The good news is that generative AI will not likely take anyone’s job soon. Remember when everyone worried that Photoshop would eliminate jobs for designers? The same worries always arise when any new software, like Microsoft Publisher or Canva, comes out. Now that we’ve had some time to use these programs, we think of them all as just a tool that enhances our work. Generative AI is no different.
While AI can do some incredible things, it has some flaws, so it needs that human touch to edit and fine-tune what it creates. Often, AI-created content is more useful as inspiration or a starting off point. For example, if you want a general image for a brainstorm, such as “apples gently falling out of a basket,” it can create that for you, but it cannot successfully create images of specific products or scenes. Ultimately, the client will need an editor or designer to tweak the ideas to better suit their needs.
Additionally, these programs don’t just produce content on their own. Their outputs are only as good as the inputs that we provide. As social media marketing professionals, one of our functions is to accurately develop strategic plans for our clients to help them reach their goals. With generative AI, our role is more important than ever. Our skill and expertise are needed to create well-written AI prompts for our clients to create a great result.
How Can We Use Generative AI as Social Media Marketers?
So, we can think of AI as a useful tool to elevate our work as social media marketers. Take the time to figure out how each program works and which specialty it can help you with.
There are so many emerging AI tools out there, so the best way to know how they can help you is to test them and see which ones consistently produce the best results. Plus, each time you test the product, you train it to give better results, so you can’t judge it until you use it.
There are many ways generative AI can help writers. For example, ChatGPT can be useful for cleaning up your copy. For example, you can use it to rewrite run-on sentences when you’re trimming copy or to help modify the tone of your emails so you come across the right way. You can also provide it with the background information to create a blog post, and it can generate a good outline or draft for you. However, it probably won’t create a great original draft for you.
For designers, programs like Mid Journey can help you quickly create backgrounds or filler. You may have to do a little Photoshop to clean up the image, but it can save you a lot of time by giving you a starting point to work with.
How Will Generative AI Impact the Future of Social Media?
At the end of the day, AI is just a form of automation.
We can look to historical examples of automation to see how it might impact our future. For example, when automation first arrived in factories like in the auto industry in Detroit, it was this scary unknown of how it would impact jobs. However, people were still needed to run the plants and quality assurance. Jobs may have changed, and processes became more efficient, but they were not eliminated.
If you’ve been a designer for a long time, you might remember the days when ads were designed by physically making collages of graphics with paper and tape. Now, it is all done more quickly and efficiently on computers with design software. Generative AI is ushering in a similar transformation as an automation tool for social media marketers.
AI is new and exciting now, but it will soon become a regular part of our daily jobs. It is a tool that we can use to make our work easier and more efficient.
There are some ethical questions to answer about how generative AI can be used. For example, there are some gray areas around AI-generating images of people or sound clips of people’s voices to use in ads and so forth. In time, we will figure out how to address those issues.
But in general, generative AI will likely just be another great tool for social media marketers to have in their everyday toolbelt. There are AI tools that are strictly focused on being an AI tool, but also programmers are currently finding a way to integrate AI into all kinds of apps we already use. There are countless ways that it can help us break down creativity blocks, save time on tedious or time-consuming tasks, elevate our writing, and think outside of the box when brainstorming.
We’ve only just begun figuring out how AI can help us in our jobs, and the technology will most likely continue to improve with use and time. Therefore, we’ll probably have more to say on it! So, stay tuned for future blog posts where we’ll continue to discuss generative AI.
