AI and Social Media Marketing: How to Do It Right (+ What to Avoid)

Generative AI and social media marketing can go hand in hand — if you leverage the right strategy. Read on for our top tools, pro tips, and how to avoid the dreaded AI slop.

As time goes on, marketers are finding more and more ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in their working lives.

From generating Instagram captions to identifying trending topics and analyzing audience behavior, AI can use sophisticated machine learning to help marketers save time and effort, keeping them fresh for strategizing, editing, collaborating, and big-picture thinking.

But there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). The brands getting the best results aren’t letting AI take over. They’re using it as a strategic assistant instead of a replacement for creativity, expertise, or human judgment.

If your social media strategy currently consists of asking ChatGPT to “write five TikTok captions” and copying the results straight into your publishing dashboard, then we need to talk.

We tapped HawkSEM Senior Paid Social Manager Kaleigh Myers to learn more about how to use AI to improve your social media marketing. (Spoiler alert: It can be done without sacrificing authenticity, brand voice, or results.)

How AI is changing social media: Key benefits

Social media moves fast. New trends appear overnight, algorithms evolve constantly, and audiences expect brands to create fresh, engaging content across multiple platforms.

AI helps marketers keep up by making repetitive tasks faster, meaning you get results quicker and can iterate accordingly in less time.

Some of the benefits include:

• Brainstorming content ideas
• First drafts of content creation
• Copywriting ideas
• Repurposing content into social media and other types of posts
• Audience segment research
• Social listening
• Social content scheduling
• Data and performance analysis
• Creating multiple content versions for A/B testing

How marketers can use AI in their social strategy

Digital marketers don’t need to shy away from AI when planning and executing their social media strategies. However, there are a few best practices Myers says should be kept in mind.

Inspire new ideas

“In social media, both paid and organic, AI is a great tool to help spark new ideas for content or campaign messaging,” says Myers.

Leverage data

You can also use these tools to help gather data from different platforms and develop a story to help spark strategic changes.

AI can be an effective tool for:

• Predictive analytics, which involves analyzing past data, metrics, and machine learning for future predictions
• Sentiment analysis, which gauges your content’s emotional tone of voice based on context clues and natural language processing (NLP)

Identify top-performing content

For organic social, you can use the metrics of top-performing creative (imagery and copy) along with your current page demographics.

Then, you could pair that info with your ideal target demographic to come up with a social media content calendar of new content for the month.

Attract better leads

On the paid social side, Myers suggests uploading your social media management platform metrics and CRM metrics into an LLM (large language model) to see the customer journey length of a Meta lead vs. a LinkedIn lead vs. Search leads.

This can help you determine where to scale performance based on actual sales results.

How to use AI effectively in social media marketing

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve seen AI platforms be most helpful when they’re seen not as a team member, but as a tool.

See it as a scalpel, not a surgeon

“It’s best to use it as a tool, rather than a crutch or complete partner,” Myers says. “If you’re exclusively pushing out 25 posts and 15 ad campaigns with 20 pieces of ad copy that ChatGPT created and images from OpenAI, users can tell.”

In today’s world of digital fatigue, all customers, clients, and followers crave authenticity and authentic human connection.

“There’s a difference between using Vids to generate a stock video that doesn’t exist and exclusively running video ads of an AI avatar talking about how great your product is,” Myers adds. “Leave that to the user-generated content.”

Leverage descriptions and context hints

Myers says it’s important to be as descriptive as possible about what you’re looking for. She also recommends offering feedback to whichever platform you’re on about what they got wrong.

Bad Example: ‘Give me 5 companies that sell shoes’

Good Example: ‘I run Meta Ads for a leather shoe company whose main selling point is high-quality, long-lasting leather goods. The client has recently had an issue with abandoned cart rates and is interested in messaging to reach users who are looking for a higher-quality shoe, rather than cheap shoes. What are 5 other companies targeting similar high-value footwear that run Meta Ads, and what is our ad account [#############] doing differently?

Further reading: ChatGPT Ads Context Hints: What They Are + How to Create Ones That Work

What to avoid when it comes to AI and social media

It can feel tempting to let the AI chatbots and machine learning algorithms simply take the wheel.

But the numbers don’t lie.

If your CRM and sales data show you’re not reaching high-quality leads who are ready (or almost ready) to convert, then you need to be making manual changes to who you’re targeting, how you’re personalizing content, and what messaging you’re putting out there on your social profiles.

Be strategic about the AI tools you use

“Meta Leads do not always equal ‘paying customer,’” explains Myers.

“If your target audience is niche, then Advantage+ ad targeting is not for you. If your leads answer the phone saying they don’t know what they signed up for, then Advantage+ copy variations need to be reviewed. If your customers are seeing weird cropping of your ad, Advantage+ is to blame.”

Avoid AI slop at all costs

Just as quickly as AI tools grew in popularity, people started noticing the same visuals cropping up again and again in AI-generated images and videos. This content was dubbed “AI slop.”

It’s almost guaranteed that you’ve been exposed to AI slop published by a brand online. This content is characterized as being low quality, unoriginal, and just generally unappealing. In fact, it’s become so pervasive that LinkedIn added a button so users could easily report “AI-generated ‘slop.’”

Recently, I came across this image a kickboxing studio posted on their Instagram:

Not only were my eyes unable to discern where to look first because of all the competing text and images, but the goal of the post (to promote an upcoming event) was completely overshadowed when I noticed that the flyer was clearly — and poorly — AI-generated. (The hands are always a dead giveaway.)

You can avoid falling into the AI slop trap by:

• Offering feedback to your chosen chatbot to help it fine-tune outputs
• Using AI-generated imagery as a jumping-off point that you edit and modify
• Following graphic design best practices (like not having too much competing text)
• Paying close attention to the details of your images to ensure they’re high quality
• Having a professional designer in charge of leveraging and approving AI visuals

AI tools our experts recommend

Since AI tools arrived on the scene, we’ve been experimenting with various offerings, exploring their features, and identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

Recently, our team has been playing around with Manus, Meta’s AI platform. “Being able to enter your client’s Ad Account ID and ask the platform to pull data from other campaigns targeting the same users and pull creative insights on what we can be doing differently is very impressive,” says Myers.

“I also have been using it for creative audits of clients’ own ads to review what was working a year ago versus what’s working 90 days ago and offer recommendations based on our own historic data.”

Other popular tools include social media platforms like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social that have added AI features to enhance the customer experience.

The bottom line

Myers says AI should be a jumping-off point to feed your creative, not the main driver of your creative strategy.

“AI is fed by other companies, so it’s most likely to initially create generic ad copy and headlines that they are telling every other company that asks for the same prompt,” she explains.

Instead, she recommends using AI for ideas and inspiration that can spark your own personal imagination and creativity. Think: “What are 18 different Christmas puns to sell gift baskets?” rather than, “Give me 10 Christmas headlines for purchase ads to sell gift baskets.”

There are plenty of benefits to using AI tools in your social media strategy. The success you find with them depends on the tools you choose to use, how you use them, and keeping the core goals of your campaign and overall marketing plan in mind along the way.

Want more help figuring out how AI can enhance your marketing strategy? Let’s talk.