Generative AI usage has fast become commonplace in the social media marketing world.
Indeed, 73% of marketing professionals say their organizations are using gen AI tools like ChatGPT, with social media copy and social media imagery named as the second and third most popular use cases — only behind email copy.
But with 43% of marketers admitting they don’t know how to get the most value from gen AI, it’s clear that despite high adoption rates, many are yet to unlock the technology’s full potential.
If that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place, because we’re sharing eight of our favorite ChatGPT prompting techniques for social media marketers.
Let’s get into it…
1. Break Free From the Google Search Mindset
For the past 20+ years, Google has trained us to adopt a specific set of behaviors when searching for information online. We type a single, straightforward query, then sift through the results hoping to find a relevant answer (which, of course, won’t be tailored to our specific needs).
Sydney Stern Miller, Digital Marketing Strategy Manager at Deloitte and self-described “AI enthusiast and voracious learner,” believes it’s high time we ditch this outlook.
Rather than relying on a single query to get results, she encourages users to challenge ChatGPT to come up with better questions. “When I first started out prompting AI, I’d start every chat with these instructions: ‘During this conversation, please always do two things;
- Review the question I ask, propose a better question, and see if I would like to use that question instead of my original question.
- Always ask at least one follow-up question after your response to further the conversation and provide more insight into the topic.’”
That way, you can feel confident that you’ve considered all the angles when researching a topic.
👉 Want more insights from Sydney? Don’t miss our 2024 AI for Marketers Summit, where she’ll be sharing her top learnings and tips on AI prompting techniques.
2. Define Your Goals, Audience & Deliverables
Just like when you’re briefing a human colleague, it pays to get specific with your ChatGPT prompts. That way, the outputs are more likely to meet your expectations.
Whether we’re chatting about campaign ideas or collaborating on copy options, we like to start our ChatGPT conversations by clearly defining:
- The goal we’re aiming to achieve
- The audience we’re targeting
- The deliverables we want ChatGPT to produce
Here’s a prompt you can use in your own chats — just remember to swap the placeholders for information about your own brand, products, and audience:
“I’m the social media manager for a [sustainable fashion company]. I need help writing [Instagram copy] to engage my audience of [Millennial women]. The goal is to [drive website visits and sales]. Based on this information, come up with [three 50-word captions for Instagram].”
Let’s take a look at what ChatGPT came up with based on this prompt:
Not brilliant, but not bad — it’s even experimented with three different CTAs.
Just remember: if you manage social channels for multiple brands or write for several different audiences, you should start a new conversation for every new goal or deliverable you’re targeting.
3. Get a Head Start On Strategy Creation
Sure, ChatGPT can be an effective tool when you need to generate a bunch of social media captions fast.
But don’t limit your usage to content creation-related tasks, because it can also handle more strategic work.
For instance, we gave ChatGPT the prompt: “Create a three-month social media strategy for a sustainable fashion brand covering Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.”
And it did what we asked…
Sure, the results are pretty basic. And, naturally, they don’t take into account the specifics of our (imaginary) brand, audience, and goals. But it provides a useful framework that can jump-start your own strategy creation process — and it might even lead you down some paths you’d otherwise have overlooked.
👉 Learn more: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy
4. Tailor Your Results With Follow-Up Prompts
GPT-4 is trained on literally trillions of words.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll nail your prompt first time.
Fact is, you know your brand and audience better than any large language model. So when you’re using ChatGPT to write copy for social posts, be sure to guide the results using follow-up prompts.
For example, we prompted it to write a 100-word Instagram caption explaining the importance of sustainable fashion. The results were pretty good, if a little dry:
But, to be fair, we didn’t provide any guidance around tone of voice, so this isn’t ChatGPT’s fault.
Really, we were looking for something a little brighter and breezier, so we followed up with two further prompts:
- “Make it less formal”
- “Make it more positive”
Here’s what it came back with:
That’s much more like it!
Even if you’re totally satisfied with the first result ChatGPT produces, it’s well worth following up with additional instructions so you’ve got something to compare it against.
5. Ask for Content Ideas
Approximately half of marketers spend 10 – 20 hours per month on content ideation.
It’s easy to see why. If you’re posting multiple times a week across several different social platforms, coming up with a constant stream of original ideas is tough.
But ChatGPT never gets tired of brainstorming — and it’s capable of coming up with a pretty much infinite list of content themes, topics, and post ideas. Here are a few prompts you can use:
- What are some creative social media content ideas for a [niche] company?
- What types of social media content should I share to increase followers on [platform]?
- Come up with some [platform] content ideas for [niche]
Naturally, not all of the ideas will be good. Chances are they’ll all be pretty generic. And we also found that ChatGPT lacks a little marketing nous. For instance, it suggested our sustainable fashion brand should review clothes from other sustainable fashion brands, which would either involve promoting or insulting our (imaginary) competitors.
However, generative AI is often a numbers game, and there’s always a decent chance you’ll find a diamond in the rough:
It wouldn’t take much polishing to turn this into a viable campaign incorporating multiple posts. Which isn’t bad for a single ChatGPT prompt.
👉 Learn more: The “Creative Desert”: Brainstorming Social Content Ideas During Slow Days
6. Repurpose Existing Content (Fast)
Another way to reduce the pressure of coming up with new social media content ideas is to repurpose existing assets, such as:
- Blog posts
- Webinar transcripts
- E-books
Left to a human, this is a pretty labor-intensive task. You might have to wade through thousands of words of copy, making notes as you go, just to identify a handful of post themes. So why not let ChatGPT do all the leg work?
Because our sustainable fashion brand doesn’t actually exist, we copy-pasted a Vogue article on sustainable fashion trends into ChatGPT and asked it to turn the text into three 280-character tweets:
Sure, we’d never recommend posting the results straight to your brand’s socials, but they should give you a solid jumping-off point. And if you don’t like the posts they’ve come up with, you can always ask ChatGPT to try again.
7. Learn From the AI
As humans, we taught ChatGPT everything it knows.
But did you know that we can also learn from ChatGPT?
That’s right. One of our favorite prompting techniques is to dig into the reasons behind the results. When the platform comes up with some snappy copy or a winning content idea, ask it to explain its “thought process.”
For example, let’s say we particularly enjoyed one of the Instagram captions it came up with back in section #3, and we want to understand it a little better. We could ask ChatGPT by using a prompt such as: “I like the second example. Why did you structure it in this way?”
In fact, that’s exactly what we did. Here’s what ChatGPT came back with:
You know what? That’s actually pretty useful. Normally, when someone asks me why I phrased something a certain way, I just shrug.
8. Analyze Your Competitors
Running social media competitive analysis takes time — especially if you haven’t invested in a dedicated tool like Sprout Social or Rival IQ. But ChatGPT can handle some of the hard yards for you.
Here’s a prompt we used to identify competitors in the sustainable fashion space: “Write a list of the top 10 sustainable fashion brands in the US and include their website URL, Instagram URL, Facebook URL, and TikTok URL.”
And here are the results:
And you can take this process a step further by asking ChatGPT to list the unique selling points for each of those brands, too:
As with any ChatGPT output, the results require a little sense-checking. For example, it listed The Sill — an online houseplant store — as one of our sustainable fashion brand’s top competitors.
But a lot of the information is pretty useful, and it’d take a bunch of time to round it all up manually.
Plus you can even ask ChatGPT to format the results as a CSV file so you can copy-paste it into Excel or Google Sheets for further analysis using a prompt like: “Can you format this information as a CSV?”
Want to learn how top social media marketers are leveraging AI tools to transform and optimize their marketing strategies? Register for our 2024 AI for Marketers Summit.
Featured image by Freepik.
