Natural language processing tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are here to stay, but they won’t be taking your social media job any time soon. Rather than feeling threatened by it, see it as more of a tool to complement your content development.
Think of AI as your new social media intern — it has plenty of theoretical knowledge, it can process a lot of information, but it still needs to be directed by an experienced and skillful manager. While marketing requires plenty of writing, not all content is exciting or triggers human curiosity. That's where AI marketing can be useful and generate a good starting point for your content, so that your time and energy can be allocated to that portion of writing that needs the human touch.
The more you master AI tools in your social media role, the more you’ll see it enhance your content. Let AI be your friend in social media with these best practices.
Provide context within your prompt
Natural language processing is a type of technology that allows computers to understand and interpret human language and then respond like a person, with the use of AI. This is done by conversing with a tool, such as ChatGPT, and using natural dialogue to prompt it so that you receive detailed responses to your questions.
How you prompt your AI tool can make all the difference in achieving the best results. AI prompting is essentially how you talk to your AI and how well you can instruct it to provide you with an answer that is coherent and relevant to the context. Your AI tool doesn’t have access to your brand's personality. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to ensure your AI tool is aware of these details before it can generate a response that aligns with your brand.
While AI can understand the information we’re relaying to it, it processes language differently than humans. It’s how you prompt it that helps to elicit a response similar to that of a human being.
Treat each interaction like a conversation
When using an AI-powered tool, you want to converse with them like they are human if you’d like to receive human-like responses.
By conversing with an AI tool rather than talking at it, there's an opportunity for AI to gain a better understanding of the information you’d like it to compute and how to convey it. Each time the AI-powered tool generates an answer, you can ask it to direct its focus or add/remove certain points so that you're happy with the end result.
It's essentially a never-ending conversation that can be picked back up at any time, as AI tools like ChatGPT, for instance, have a rich history in each conversation. If you leave a particular conversation for a week or a month and then return to it, it will still remember your previous conversation as you ask it new questions and provide new prompts.
By treating your AI tool as if you’re having a conversation, you’re more likely to interact with it in a natural way, just like you would with any other person. This can help to build a mutual understanding between you and your AI tool. You’re also more likely to stay engaged, as it makes the interaction more interactive and interesting.
Before you know it, you’ll find yourself deeply invested in the exchange and start learning a few things from it.
Be careful of information overload
As AI-generated content becomes increasingly prevalent, it can be challenging to avoid information overload. AI can work a lot faster than a human, but it’s still possible to feed it more information than it can handle.
AI language models can be affected by the quality and quantity of the data it’s trained on. To ensure effectiveness, AI-powered tools must be trained on high-quality data and constantly refined to provide accurate responses.
It’s easy to simply feed your AI instructions all at once and watch it do the job for you. However, this can end in your AI rambling for pages with text that isn’t necessarily relevant to your content. The best way to overcome this is by breaking up your content into sections to make sure you get the answer you’re looking for (or close to it), before moving on to the next section. For best results, you also want to make sure you're as descriptive as possible when describing each task.
Review closely, and fact-check
Fact-checking is an essential practice in journalism, research, and academia to ensure the accuracy and credibility of information. The same principle applies to AI-generated content. Machine learning models can develop biases based on the data they’re trained on. If the training data contains misleading information, you’ll run into inaccuracies that need to be fact-checked by a human.
AI content is written in a way that is generally easy to understand and very sound. It's going to sound confident in talking about many different topics, which might make it difficult to recognize what's wrong with the text. For instance, ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to the entirety of the Internet up to 2021, but nothing past that. So it may give you something that sounds very authoritative but doesn't actually reflect the latest information for that area of study.
Unlike humans, AI doesn’t have the self-awareness to tell you that it doesn’t know enough about a certain subject. Instead, it's going to scour its immense database of information about the subject matter at hand and try to spout a coherent response, even if that response misses some very key details. You still need to be an expert on your industry and have the ability to spot when the AI isn't getting it right, or risk letting it essentially steal your credibility.
The takeaway
AI language models are becoming an increasingly important tool in the world of social media. With their ability to understand and generate human-like language, they are helping social media professionals streamline their work. But no matter how evolved AI gets, the human touch is always needed.
As a Social Media Manager, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes of content creation, so the extra help doesn't hurt. AI language models are making it easier for social media professionals to drive engagement on their platforms and achieve their goals. As AI technology continues to develop, we will likely see even more innovative uses for these powerful tools in the social media marketing world.
The key is to help AI help you. By approaching AI-powered tools with these best practices, you can secure better results for your brand.
