Using AI sounds super exciting, but the truth is it’s not. 🫣

The Reality of AI in Social Media Marketing: Hype vs. Practical Use

A lot of us see global brands investing a ton of money in specific AI efforts and initiatives. Coca-Cola pairing up with WPP and NVIDIA to scale Generative AI Content for Brand Authenticity is one example. Big tech companies are racing to create the best AI experiences for their users and finding ways to monetize it or make it feel exclusive/superior compared to others, such as Apple with its Apple Intelligence.

The big investments coming from these bigger brands feed into the AI hype, but what about the rest of us and our workplaces? How are we using AI in our daily workloads and has it really been that revolutionary?

The short answer: No, AI hasn’t been that revolutionary, but we have found ways to use AI in our daily workloads to our benefit.

It’s not like we can hit a single button to automate all kinds of AI to work together to instantly create social media posts customized to each channel specifications with AI created imagery that perfectly matches a client or brand, adds in perfect social copy to each post with relevant hashtags, then auto-publishes it. That would create a complete mess of quality issues, but it also shows how social marketers may think or wish AI could work for them someday.

This chart from eMarketer provides an excellent recap of how different the mindset of AI varies between someone who actually uses it versus someone who doesn’t.

Our team spent over 800 hours using AI and tested it against specific use cases to see what’s possible and what’s not for our social media agency work. While these uses below can be helpful in most marketing settings, they’re not that remarkable or groundbreaking. They’re also not going to replace you any time soon.

Our Top 3 AI Use Cases Our Agency Implements

1. Your Very Own Writing Assistant – AI is widely used to help users write or generate text in various ways. From generating ideas for blog articles, copywriting starters, getting help to draft an email to a client, editing a whitepaper, and more, AI-assisted writing is helpful. In our agency, this use case is the strongest and most frequently used across all our discipline teams because of it’s ease of use and speed.
   • • The catch? You must review what’s generated to ensure the tone fits, the right industry or client terms are used, it sounds like the individual writing it versus a chatbot, and fact check any data provided to sources. The way we write has a lot of rule bending that AI cannot understand or generate itself as it cannot “think,” and we see this especially when it comes to social media and generational slang currently being used.
2. Your Always Available Brainstorming Partner – Sometimes you need a little extra brainpower instead of a cup of coffee, and AI can be that for you. Whether it’s asking for social caption ideas, another way to say something, trying to take your words and spinning it to a specific audience, or breaking a concept down further, there are countless ways AI can help you when it comes to conceptualization.
   • • The catch? Not everything generated is going to be a winner. In fact, you’ll quickly learn that it’ll create some outlandish suggestions or doesn’t differentiate enough. When using AI as a brainstorming partner, you have to learn to find the good stuff hidden within the bad, then try to expand further on it on your own using our set of knowledge that no AI tool has access to.
3. Your Specifically Skilled Content Producer On-Demand – Finding ways to create quality content is a big draw to using AI for image generation. Some of our content producers have praised where AI can be handy, but it’s pretty limited as our brands require very specific parameters, so it really comes down to knowing where it can and cannot work. Things that work can look like generating stock images or backgrounds, generative fill to avoid a reshoot, producing textures, and more.
   • • The catch? You need to be extra picky how your using AI for images. There are a lot of things AI doesn’t do well (*coughs human hands*) and that’s okay. AI can assist your content producer or marketing teams with smaller and specific image tasks, which can save your team time after you learn the skill of prompting. There is also the whole copyright issues and AI transparency when it comes to using AI images that is still getting figured out, which can make this side of AI risky.

Practical Applications of AI in Social Media Marketing

The use cases listed above are areas our social media agency has found early success with AI given our time spent experimenting with various tools. However, any form of AI will always need that human intervention and tweaking to make it successful. There’s no way around it.

Every workplace across all industries has fantasized about what AI could mean for their business by now, along with every worker questioning if it can replace them or at the very least remove some tedious tasks from their workloads. Who hasn’t wished for that?

Unfortunately, we’re all discovering AI is nowhere near all the hype and it’s quite boring to use given its severe limitations and lack of accuracy because it’s nowhere near capable in comparison to an even stronger intelligence available – YOU (AKA a human). But that doesn’t mean it’s not a very helpful time saver when used correctly.

Ask anyone on our team and they’ll all give you a similar answer – AI is only helpful if the person using it understands its weak points and how to prompt it, and it’s not anywhere near a perfect solution.