If you’re a social media marketing manager and you’ve not considered how ChatGPT can help you work more effectively, you’re missing out! Some people might be worried that these kinds of AI platforms could eventually replace them at work, but the truth is that they are simply tools that can help us work smarter and faster, rather than posing a threat to our careers.
ChatGPT is exceptionally good at streamlining some of the more tedious and repetitive tasks of social media management, freeing up your time to focus on the more enjoyable, creative aspects of the job.
At Meltwater we’re so convinced of the value of AI that we’ve integrated ChatGPT into our social media management product, Engage, to help our users improve their productivity. But even if you’re not yet a Meltwater customer, you can still save time with ChatGPT using these social media marketing life hacks we’ve put together.
Table of Contents
General Tips for ChatGPT in Social Media Marketing
Use ChatGPT to Summarize Content for Social Posts
Use ChatGPT to Create Alternative Copy Quickly
Use ChatGPT to Generate Content Ideas
Use ChatGPT to Get Help with Social Media Marketing Planning
Customize ChatGPT for Your Social Media Marketing Needs
- Use ChatGPT to Prepare for a Social Media Crisis
Reading Tips: Practical Guide to ChatGPT for Marketing and PR, 9 Powerful ChatGPT Prompts for Marketing, Will ChatGPT take my Marketing Job?, How to use ChatGPT for PR Agencies
General Tips for ChatGPT in Social Media Marketing
- When writing prompts for ChatGPT, be as specific and detailed as possible to leave minimal room for misinterpretation and errors. Just like a human, the tool will deliver better results if given a great brief.
- Always fact-check ChatGPT’s work, especially in situations where factual accuracy is important. The system can appear very smart, but it’s not always right. Sometimes it can give you incorrect information in an authoritative tone, so don’t be fooled.
- Be prepared to rewrite ChatGPT’s output. Most of the time the copy it generates is pretty generic and bland, so it can be a great starting point if you’re out of inspiration, but it will usually benefit from some editing to really make the copy sparkle. Think of it as a copywriting tool, not a copywriter.
- Remember that you can ask ChatGPT to revise its results, so if it generates a response you’re not happy with, you can give it feedback and ask it to try again.
- The paid version of ChatGPT gives you access to the Code Interpreter feature which, despite the name, can be useful for general users because it allows you to upload all kinds of files for it to analyze, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
- Be sure to protect your company data! By default ChatGPT will use any data you share with it to help train its model, but you can turn this off with the “Chat History & Training” option in the Data Controls menu. Even with data sharing turned off, it’s not advisable to enter any highly sensitive data into the tool.
Use ChatGPT to Summarize Content for Social Posts
Need to write a tweet or LinkedIn post to promote a blog or other piece of content from your website? You can simply ask ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting, either by pasting the text of the original content into your prompt, or attaching a file for it to analyze, if you have the paid version.
Your social media marketing prompt should be something like: “Below is the text of a blog post from my company website which I want to promote on our social media channels. Write social media posts suitable for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which highlight the content of this blog and will encourage people to read it: [blog text]”
Use ChatGPT to Create Alternative Copy Quickly
Sometimes you need to find a few different ways of saying the same thing, if you want to communicate a message consistently but without sounding repetitive, and that can be a struggle. But not for ChatGPT! You can ask it to produce as many alternative options as you need, and while some of them might not be great, it can keep giving you different ideas until you find some that you like.
Use a social media marketing prompt like this: “Please rewrite the following tweet in 20 different ways, so that it retains its meaning but does not sound repetitive: [tweet text]”
Use ChatGPT to Generate Content Ideas
When you’re a social media manager you need to create a lot of content ideas to keep feeding the machine, but it’s not always easy and sometimes inspiration takes a day off. On those days, you can rely on ChatGPT to help you out. Just explain what the situation is, and ask for some content ideas.
Use ChatGPT to Get Help with Social Media Marketing Planning
Whether you’re planning out an entire social media content calendar for the quarter, or just a limited plan for a specific social media campaign, ChatGPT can help you with that. Give the tool as much information as possible about the broader plan, either in a prompt or an uploaded document, and then simply ask it to map out a social media plan based on your channels and objectives.
An example prompt for this: “The attached document contains our company’s marketing plan for the next three months. Using this information, please create a social media content plan to support this marketing activity, for our social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For each post, you should provide text appropriate for each of these channels, as well as a detailed description of an accompanying image. Please also recommend suitable ideas for polls, giveaways, and other activities to promote audience engagement, relevant to the marketing plan.”
ChatGPT is unlikely to give you a complete social media marketing plan that’s ready to go right out of the box, but it should at least provide a framework or starting point that you can build upon and adapt.
Customize ChatGPT for Your Social Media Marketing Needs
By default ChatGPT outputs neutral, bland copy, but a recent new feature makes it easier to tailor its results to your own requirements. Hidden away in the settings menu, in the left-hand bottom corner of the screen, you’ll find an option called custom instructions, and this provides two dialogue boxes for you to give ChatGPT information on how you would like it to behave.
In the first box, you should give it information about your role, the company you work for, your objectives, and any other details that might help it understand your needs more clearly.
In the second section, you can give it instructions about how you would like it to respond to your requests. This can include things like writing style and tone of voice, the preferred length of responses, any particular words or phrases you don’t like, and whether it should offer opinions or focus on facts. If your company has style guidelines for copy, you can put them in here.
Use this feature well, and you should see much better results from ChatGPT which means you spend less time rewriting its output.
Use ChatGPT to Prepare for a Social Media Crisis
The best way to prepare for a crisis is to map out all of the potential issues that might hit your company and role-play how you will react to them, and how they might unfold. But the whole point of a crisis is that they can be unpredictable, so it’s difficult to prepare for every situation.
You can use ChatGPT to come up with some potential crisis situations that you might not have thought about. Start by giving it as much detail about your company, industry and market as possible, then ask it to imagine what kind of crisis might unfold in the future.
“My company makes kitchen appliances and utensils specifically for home-baking enthusiasts. Our products are all manufactured at our small workshop in Gary, Indiana, and sold exclusively to the US and Canadian markets. We market our products through social media channels and partnerships with online baking influencers. Please help me prepare for potential future social media crises by suggesting possible unexpected adverse events that could result in a crisis.”
This will help you map out some possible events you hadn’t considered. But you can go one step further, and ask ChatGPT to help role-play each scenario with you. For example “Help me to role-play this situation so I can create a better crisis response plan. If we responded to the problem by posting a formal apology on social media, what might be some unintended consequences that we would face?”
You can then use ChatGPT’s responses to map out the various ways a crisis might unfold, and plan how you will react to them.
These are just a few suggestions for ChatGPT Social Media Marketing life hacks. It’s an incredibly flexible tool, which can be used in all kinds of ways, so we’re sure that once you start experimenting with it, you’ll find lots of new ideas to work smarter with AI.
