Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that allows a computer to perform a task that would normally require human intervention. Intelligence, understanding, learning, decision-making, speech recognition – while previously we could only attribute a set of these skills to humans, today AI is successfully taking over the above functions. Thanks to these competences, AI applications and their wide range of choices are applicable to almost all business areas and tasks where 100% human input is no longer necessary. Social networks and their development are no exception.

Working with global brands, we use AI every day, both in social media and in other digital communication channels. In fact, the most successful practice in our agency, and the one we recommend to others, is to turn AI into an extra helping hand, an assistant, but not the final decision-maker.

• High chances of capturing the attention of your target audience: users spend about 2 hours 27 minutes on social networks every day (compared to only 52 seconds on a business website).
• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a business on social media platforms are more likely to recommend it to others.
• 66% of Generation Z, 72% of Generation Y, 49% of Generation X and 45% of Baby Boomers say that social networks influence their purchasing decisions.
• 51% of consumers say they are very likely to return again if a business answers a question on social media.
• 54% of people use social media to search for brands and products.

Whether you do social media communication on your own or with the help of a fellow AI, the start is almost identical in both cases. Looking at the business target audience and the platform where they spend most of their time (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), the next steps are:

For effective social media marketing, laying the foundations of a competitor’s social media strategy is a very valuable first step. What social media platforms are other players using? What content do they publish and what content do they not? What are the competitors’ communication strengths, styles, business messages? Knowing your competitors and their actions and strategies is the key to better, more effective and results-oriented communication.

How would you like to be seen and heard by your audience – as a business that communicates in a businesslike, professional and educational way, or on the contrary – friendly, playful and supportive? And how should you present yourself in the social media space in the eyes of experts? A brand archetype, a target customer and communication guidelines that maximise their relevance, headings (content pillars), frequency and best times to communicate, brand keywords and phrases, a style guide and other details for a seamless, strategy-driven communication. The tone of communication is a strategy to avoid wasting precious time on irrelevant communication and to have a clear plan of how, when and how not to communicate in order to be productive.

Writing without a plan is not only inefficient, it is also a time-consuming and low-motivation process. With a long-term social media communication strategy (communication tone presentation), a step that is recommended on a consistent monthly basis is a monthly communication plan. This is a calendar of posts that reflect the communication headings in the strategy and the relevant messages for your business for a given period.

Which design elements, colours or illustrations will be used in social media content is part of the communication tone of the strategy in the presentation. What to look out while working on that? If the business already has brand guidelines (brand book), it is worth following them, maintaining visual integrity and keeping it in mind in all communication channels used. Remember, wherever you communicate, for maximum results, it is particularly important that every public outlet also represents the brand itself, i.e. is associated with your brand, is memorable in its elements, creates a connection and expands the potential audience.

How can we use AI to make its employment truly meaningful and the content it produces fulfil its core function of delivering value to consumers? Let’s break social media content creation down into a series of steps:

AI can quickly generate new ideas based on the business area you’re in and the target audience for the content you’re publishing. This is particularly useful when you are short of ideas or time in the first phase of content creation. Of course, human input is also unavoidable – it’s worth filtering the topics suggested by the AI and selecting only those that have not been covered before (by your business or your competitors), and that most accurately reflect your brand’s values and your audience’s expectations.

Planning your post (communication grid)You’ve chosen 10 topics for your Facebook posts, but you’re not sure how to arrange them in your monthly grid? Artificial Intelligence applications can help you create a communication plan and optimise the frequency of posts. However, it’s important to make sure that the dates and times you propose to publish your posts coincide with the period when your audience is most active.

Feel free to leave the “backbone”, the structure and the initial draft in the hands of an artificial intelligence, but a review of the text is a must. Not only is it likely that the AI will create a non-existent word, but it may also include a factual error or fail to perfectly reflect the tone of the business communication. If authenticity, original content and impeccable quality are important to you, then additional editing is a must.

One of the areas where AI is almost masterful is the creation of illustrations. While it is certainly worth using this advantage in social media communication, the human role remains unavoidable. Here, it will take effort to turn a single image into a cohesive design that reflects the image of the business, complete with logo, headline and other branding elements.

Is the text of the post ready? Now you can summarise it with hashtags. Once the AI has read the text of the social media post, it will successfully suggest a number of hashtag options that summarise the content created. Your mission is to assess whether the suggested hashtags are relevant to the topic of the post and the business area and to choose the most appropriate ones – the ones that make the most sense for the business to be visible with.

Grammar, logic, coherent text structure, word order – these are all areas where artificial intelligence will not have much difficulty. However, only the business and its representative can objectively assess the quality of the content, its relevance to the audience and its suitability for publication on their social networking account.

There will be many different and paid-for applications, but perhaps AI-powered social network administration is possible without additional costs? The good news is that one low-cost tool will be all you need to get off to an effective start in social networks. We won’t surprise you, but we recommend ChatGPT, a free AI application that can help you with idea generation, content planning, text and image creation. By the way, the latest version of ChatGPT 4o is available for free (find out more).

Want to try out tools that your competitors might not yet be using? There’s no shortage of recommendations and reviews of other AI applications on the web. There are also plenty of websites with entire lists of useful tools for you (for example, Insidr.ai is one such site). Consider these criteria when selecting the right AI tool to help you decide if it’s worth your time when creating social media content:

• Do the tool’s features meet your needs and really make social media content creation more efficient, faster and better?
• Data security: are you sure that sensitive, confidential information (e.g. company know-how) provided to the tool will not be shared with another user as a result?
• Ease of use: is it easy enough to master the chosen tool?
• Quality: does the output of the AI tool meet your business quality standards?

One thing is clear: artificial intelligence is opening up new opportunities in social media communication. However, advances in the world of content creation are accompanied by new challenges that may not have been encountered before, or may have been encountered very rarely. In conclusion, here are some important considerations that will help you to remain cautious and to use AI tools for your business image not only effectively but also responsibly:

• Finding the uniqueness of content. AI learns from the myriad of other sources on the internet to give you the result you want – consider the risk that the image or text you use may not be 100% unique, and in some cases may even be very similar to what we already see in the public domain. Perhaps even on a competitor’s social media account.
• Speaking of quality, AI also has room for improvement. While AI’s strength is speed, even the most advanced tools are still not advanced enough to produce flawless content in English. That is why human involvement is inevitable.
• Inaccurate information. Depending on the tool used and the version chosen (paid or not), the level of knowledge and novelty of artificial intelligence can vary (for example, even by several years). Fictitious quotations or statistical facts are also common, so the information provided by AI needs to be checked.