Let’s be honest, at First Internet we’ve made our name through not cutting corners, avoiding manual penalties because of Google algorithm updates and generally avoiding jumping on trends too soon. That said, we’re always keen to make sure we’re on top of trends and assessing their benefit for our clients. AI has been a hot topic for some time, but how does it affect social media content creation?
AI social media content creation is becoming more common as more people gain access to next-generation artificial intelligence platforms.
But is AI content creation a good or bad thing? Should it form part of your social media marketing mix either now or in the near future?
In this article we’ll take a look at how AI can be used to generate content for social media posts of different kinds, as well as some of the types of artificial intelligence social media platforms are using themselves.
This is a fast-moving area of online technology, but we’ll try to look at the bigger picture, including the issues that are likely to persist as AI grows more sophisticated in the coming years.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is sometimes called ‘machine learning’. It describes a computer’s ability to learn from the data fed into it.
For example, in a large language model, the computer is given vast amounts of written text, which it analyses in order to learn grammar, sentence structure, tone of voice and even some stylistic techniques.
With enough training, an AI language model can begin to mimic human creativity, e.g. writing stories with a cohesive plot, or writing poems that fit a certain rhyming pattern.
However, AI platforms still need to be given a ‘prompt’ by a human user. Essentially, you tell the AI what you want, and it generates some content to match.
AI content creation can take many different forms, some of which have applications in social media marketing.
Some examples of AI social media content creation for marketing purposes might include:
AI can be used in the initial planning stage, to suggest different ideas that could be developed into content for your social media channels. In this sense, AI is not directly responsible for content creation, but may still form a key part of your content planning process.
You can ask AI to write tweets, threads, Facebook posts and Instagram captions about a particular subject. A well-trained AI will produce platform-specific output, for example using hashtags on social media sites that support them.
Text is not the only format AI can output. Some AI platforms are capable of generating images based on a given prompt. The results can be nightmare fuel, but with a bit of tweaking the finished images may be used to illustrate blog pages and social media posts.
AI video production takes image generation into animated territory. You may have seen AI face animators, which can take a photograph of a person and animate their facial expressions. Some AI platforms can also transform the style of a video, e.g. creating a cartoon version of a live action clip.
There are even more uses of artificial intelligence on social media platforms, including some you might not even notice.
Facebook uses AI extensively to suggest content you might enjoy, to automatically tag people in photographs, and to generate captions based on what the AI thinks it can ‘see’ in uploaded photos (e.g. food, landscape, animals).
In addition to personalising users’ feeds and deciding which posts to show at the top, Instagram uses AI to identify potentially harmful images, captions and comments. If you’ve ever had a completely innocent post flagged as harmful, it’s likely a ‘false positive’ AI decision was to blame.
The most visible use of AI on Snapchat is in its filters, which can apply visual effects to users’ selfies based on sophisticated tracking of different facial features and other biometrics.
It’s no surprise that so many people find TikTok addictive. The platform uses AI to decide what content to show to different people, focusing on suggestions that increase dwell time and keep visitors logged on for longer.
The platform formerly known as Twitter uses AI again to personalise users’ home feeds, and to decide which part of a picture to show in the cropped thumbnail – hopefully ensuring that the thumbnail shows something useful.
Like any tool, AI content creation has its upsides and its downsides – and deciding whether or not to use it means weighing up the pros and cons.
AI social media marketing has its benefits. Using AI to process your analytics data can help to increase your audience size and focus on generating content your viewers want to see.
If your social media marketing campaign includes paid posts, AI data analysis can also help to flag up where your budget would be best placed for maximum ROI.
However, AI content creation can be controversial. It’s not always clear what data was used to train the AI – and in some instances, its output may resemble a specific artist’s intellectual property a little too closely for comfort.
There’s a question of authenticity, too. Brands that post AI-generated images typically see some backlash in the comments section, so it may be preferable to keep any AI usage out of sight of your audience.
One of the biggest criticisms of using artificial intelligence in social media posts is a lack of respect for human content creators, many of whom produced the posts, artwork and other images that were used – without compensation – to train these AI models.
The copyright implications are still being tested in the courts, but that’s a much bigger issue than we can address here – it is, however, something to keep in mind when deciding whether to use AI in your marketing campaigns.
Of course, you can avoid the controversy simply by not using artificial intelligence in your campaigns. By definition, AI follows where others lead, generating output based on what humans have done before it.
Why not take the lead? Work with a reputable creative agency on your next social media marketing campaign and/or put your own personality into your content creation, and capitalise on your inspiration and intuition – qualities AI will never truly be able to possess.
Digital Marketing
13th August, 2024
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