Can AI write better social media posts than you?

On this episode, I look at how to use AI to write more engaging social media posts.

Listen now or read the transcript below.

Sign up to get my AI prompt cheat sheet.

Also scroll to the bottom to see a resource to help you integrate your staff into your social media plan.

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to the CU social strategy podcast. This is your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, your credit union copywriter. And today I wanted to talk about something that isn’t always that pleasant for us writers: AI. But over time, I have figured out that AI actually writes much better first draft social media posts than I do, especially when I’m writing, you know, a batch of posts about the same topic. So I created a little cheat sheet that gives you the prompts that I use to actually get good results.

I don’t know if you’ve tried using an AI tool, but if you just say, “hey, write me a social media post for a credit union that has a promotion on home equity loans,” you’re probably not going to get the best stuff out of there. It’s going to be something really generic, something you definitely could do better on your own. And that means it won’t really save you any time or energy to use AI, but if you create a good prompt that’s really specific, then you get something that is a great first draft, and then you can massage it to fit, you know, your members and your community a little bit better.

So the things that are really important is to include the audience. You probably have an ideal member, so you can use that as your audience definition. Be very specific when you’re describing that person. If you find that your social media users are not the same as your exact ideal member, then, you know, be more specific and describe your social media users. And you know the what they need, how they think, just who they are. Then add in who you are. Tell them you’re a credit union. Include, you know, the name, your geographic details, the other things that make your credit union and your members special, and tell your AI tool what tone you want it to use, let it know the type of language, whether you want to include emojis or include or Avoid any specific language or punctuation if you’re still using hashtags, which I’m actually going to talk about in the next episode of the podcast, let it know which hashtags you like. Or if you don’t know which hashtags you want to use, let it come up with hashtags for you. But if you don’t want to use hashtags, this is you want to tell it, I don’t want to use hashtags when you’re creating your prompt. Then if you’re doing a post or group of posts about a specific promotion, include all the details you need in the post. You can give the landing page URL, rates. If you want to include rates, all the really specific details that you think needs to be in there. Or you can keep it less specific, and you can just say, you know, it’s home equity specials, you know, for that we’re targeting for education or something like that. If it’s not for a specific promotion, let your AI tool know what the goal of this post is. If you want people to learn about a specific product that you have or an event, include all the information about the event. Include all the information about the product. If you are just trying to get some general financial education out there, just tell it what types of things you want your users to learn. So when you put all of those together, you’re going to get a post that is 1000 times better than the one that you would get if you just said, Hey, write me six social media posts about home equity loans for a credit union.

So I know that we aren’t all comfortable using AI. We’re not comfortable letting the work that we are asking it to do for us be used to train models. So if you’re worried about that, you might want to use a paid tool that includes in its term terms of service that the things that you put in there won’t be used to train the model in the future. If you’re concerned about the environmental impact of all of the server farms that are running AI and providing the energy to run AI, you know, that’s something that we it’s, it’s a little bit harder to get around. There’s not much that we can do to you know, to change the amount of energy that these tools are using. So if that is important to you or important to your members, then AI might not be the right tool for you. The other concern might be that you’re giving away too much information about your credit union to this computer, this language learning module, and that is perfectly valid. And again, that might be a place where using a paid tool will give you a little bit more of security when it comes to that, or you can use it to just get general ideas for social media posts, rather than getting anything specific. That will not ease your burden as much as getting some really specific first drafts that you just have to massage a little bit, but it still allows you to, you know, use your tools and maybe not be stuck staring at the blank screen while you’re just like, Oh my gosh. How am I going to come up with, you know, 30 posts for this month? So if you have been using AI, I’d love to hear about it. You can send me an email if you have some examples of things that have worked and haven’t worked. Or if you have more questions about how to use it, you can email me at jennifer@jennifer-roland.com, that’s J E N N I F E R At, J E N N I F E R, hyphen, R, o, l, a n, d.com, and go to credit union copywriter.com to grab a copy of a little cheat sheet that you can use so that you don’t forget any of the important elements I said to include in your AI prompts.

So thank you for listening to this episode today, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and listening so thank you for listening to this episode today, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and hearing your feedback on future episodes.