The Rise of AI in Social Media Content Creation
Something’s afoot in the world of social media marketing. Just as we’d all started to get to grips with the idea of influencers as a new kind of brand ambassador for the digital age, everything has changed. Again.
It’s commonplace these days to see online personalities promoting products and endorsing brands on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and more. But regular users of these platforms will have spotted something unusual about some of these figures. Some ‘influencers’ are not even human. They’re AI constructions.
So-called AI influencers are being used by businesses to side-step the issue of having to find an actual person to endorse their brand on social media. Or they are being used by influencers as digitised representations of themselves to extend their reach and unlock more earning potential. One person simply cannot be everywhere on social media. But an AI bot can.
AI influencers are at the sharp end of a much broader trend in social media marketing. Since Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot and Claude exploded onto the digital scene in 2022, we’ve seen something of an AI takeover, particularly in content creation for social media. The ‘generative’ in Gen AI means, this tool will do the creative legwork for you. Text, graphics, photorealistic images, even social-friendly video clips. There are Gen AI tools that will do the lot.
One global survey of marketing and media professionals in 2024 found that 42% now regularly use AI tools, and 40% of those use cases relate to social media. And it’s not all about creating automated AI influencer bots by any means.
In this article, we’ll dig into what else AI is being used for in social media marketing, some of the tools used, the benefits, and what you need to know to get started.
How is AI used in social media content creation?
The most obvious use of AI in social media is doing the content creation work for you. As we’ve already mentioned, at the most sophisticated end of the tech scale, Gen AI tools can create entire video clips, GIFs, memes and graphics simply from a prompt or brief. They can also write posts and captions for your images, as well as respond to comments and direct messaged chatbot-style.
But using AI to create content directly is just the tip of the iceberg. Social media marketers are using it in their content creation pipelines in all sorts of other ways.
Arguably the most exciting is how AI can drive content personalisation. The bottom line on personalisation in social marketing is that personalisation is essential for your bottom line. According to HubSpot, personalised CTAs outperform generic equivalents by 202%. 80% of businesses report increased customer spending (at an average uplift of 32%) on the back of personalised experiences.
But personalisation is hard to get right. Say you have a social account with 10,000 followers. That’s 10,000 lots of personal data you have to track – activity, preferences, sentiment, routines – and potentially 10,000 variations on every piece of content you create. It’s a huge logistical challenge. Left to be done manually, it quickly becomes next to impossible. With its incredible data handling and processing capabilities at speed, AI makes personalisation at scale possible.
Once you get into the realms of high-scale personalisation, you also find you are churning out huge volumes of content – remember, we’re talking 10,000 variations of every single piece of content you create, to satisfy all of your followers at a personal level. Managing all of that is another big logistical conundrum. Again, marketers are turning to AI to act as curators of their burgeoning content libraries, not just to keep it all organised in an orderly fashion, but also to identify when content can be reused and repurposed to get maximum value from it. Social content curation also involves looking out for trending topics and content relevant to your brand that you can use or respond to.
Finally, another challenge all of this creating and sharing of content at scale creates is sheer workload. Social media marketing is a quantity as well as a quality game. Regular posting and keeping on top of interactions are key to building presence and engagement. How do you keep on top of posting the right stuff to the right people at the right time? Again, AI is the social marketer’s friend here, as it can automate even the most complex posting schedules, suggest optimum times to be active (and drill that down to an individual level for your followers), and also respond to interactions in real-time.
What AI tools are social media marketers using?
AI can unlock wondrous things in content creation for social media. But another challenge is knowing which tools to use. The Gen AI market has become very crowded, very quickly.
You can use big-name Gen AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Co-Pilot to help you directly with content creation. However, there is a wide range of more specialised tools to choose from, either tailored to the needs of social media marketing or to specific functions that social marketers can take advantage of. Here are some of the top solutions social marketers are relying on.
- Buffer is an all-round social marketing management suite, with an in-built AI assistant that helps with generating post variations, repurposing content, suggesting hashtags and generally streamlining the content creation process.
- Hootsuite is another specialist social marketing platform that offers AI-powered features for ideating, creating and scheduling posts, as well as ‘’social listening’ activity monitoring and analytics that help to drive personalisation and curation.
- Jasper is a dedicated writing platform AI for marketers and is popular for generating social media posts, blogs, ad copy and more. It’s particularly good for tailoring content to your brand voice.
- For image creation, Canva is the best AI-powered graphic design tool out there. It can do everything from conjuring up eye-catching images based on a few instructions, managing the end-to-end design and creation process for content types such as social posts, and automate re-sizing of images to suit different platforms.
- Feedhive is great for workflow management in social marketing, with tools to plan, schedule and automate posts, the ability to manage multiple social accounts from one place, and a solid AI writing assistant dedicated to social posts and comments thrown in, too.
How will using AI benefit my social marketing?
There’s a good reason why social marketers are turning to these and other AI tools. In fact, there are several good reasons. Top of the list is good old-fashioned efficiency and productivity. We’ve talked about the demands of content creation for social marketing these days – working across multiple platforms, creating multimedia posts, keeping on top of comments and direct messages, looking out for trending topics you can jump on, trying to personalise every interaction.
Doing all of this at any kind of scale could easily eat up all the time available to an entire digital marketing team. It’s simply beyond the resources of most SMEs. And yet, social media is too good an opportunity to miss. AI makes social media marketing at scale possible for most businesses. It speeds up content creation and output, it automates workflows, and it handles the heavy lifting involved in social tracking, data and personalisation. Put all of that together, and it’s no wonder that more than four in five marketers report an uplift in productivity since adopting AI tools.
Another benefit is that AI helps make social content more relevant, more on-trend if you like. We’ve talked about its ability to track individual behaviours and feed that data into personalised content, and how ‘social listening’ capabilities help businesses jump onto trends that chime with both their brand and their audience. Much of the impact of social marketing depends on timing and relevance. AI helps businesses nail both.
Finally, there is a lot of debate about whether Generative AI is harming creativity, not just in marketing but across media and in the arts, too. It’s too big a discussion to go into too deeply here. But what we can say is, used the right way, AI tools can do just as much to support or even enhance human creativity as they can to sideline it. In a professional marketing context, a lot of content production boils down to the mechanics of volume and targeting and placement. By taking those sorts of tasks on, AI can free people to spend more time on the creative side. And they also offer a whole new arsenal of tools to get creative with in new and exciting ways.
Final thoughts: What do I need to do to get started with AI?
As you can see, there is a lot to think about regarding the role AI can play in social marketing and content production. If it’s a step you’re yet to take, then you’re starting point is to educate yourself about what AI can do, what tools are available and what it is good for (we hope this article has been a good starting point for that!)
From there, you should look at your current social media operations and consider where AI can help. What’s your social media strategy? What are your goals? Where are you falling short? In relation to content creation, are you struggling with scale, engagement, personalisation, or managing everything efficiently?
Once you have an idea of what you want to achieve by using AI tools, the best advice is to get stuck in and experiment. Choose a tool that matches your need and give it a go. Start small, with a low-cost plan or a free trial, and see if it makes a difference. Measure impact carefully. And if the results are good, do a little bit more.
And one final piece of advice, don’t feel you have to go it alone. Speak to a social media marketing agency like Key Element to get started answering all the above questions. We’d love to hear from you, so why not drop us a line?
Frequently Asked Questions
Will using AI make my brand feel less authentic?
Not if you use it smartly. AI should support your brand, not replace your voice. Use it to brainstorm ideas, personalise messaging, and optimise timing then layer in your human creativity and tone to keep things real and relatable.
What kind of social media tasks can I automate with AI?
A ton! Think content scheduling, comment replies, hashtag generation, performance analysis, and even trend detection. You can also create content variations, manage multi-platform posting, and repurpose old content automatically.
How do I keep my content original if AI is doing a lot of the work?
Think of AI as a creative partner, not a replacement. Use it to generate ideas, then add your unique spin. AI can speed up the process, but your brand’s personality and originality should always shine through.
Can AI help me grow my following?
Indirectly yes. AI can help you post more consistently, stay relevant, and engage faster, all of which improve your chances of growing your audience. Plus, tools that personalise content can boost interaction and loyalty.
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