I’m seeing a trend of people not investing in their social media as much and replacing people with AI. As someone who has made a career as a social media consultant, yes, this is a troubling trend.
But I’m also a realist. Budgets are tight. If you have the choice between something that is free or relatively cheap or paying a real life person to do the work, I get the temptation to use AI. You have to make the numbers make sense and maximize what you can do.
However, there is using AI effectively. And then there is making AI do something it is not meant to do. It cannot replace a whole human being. So the short answer is that AI cannot replace a social media consultant. But let’s take a look at the reasons why.
Social media strategy
I keep hearing how AI can put together a whole social media strategy. So why not save the money and have it do that?
On the surface, that might seem like a a great cost-saving option. And I even use a bit of AI when I’m putting together strategies for clients. But there are a few problems that will pop up if you solely rely on AI.
People aren’t always going to react in the way AI might predict they will. AI is taking the average reaction of the average person and spitting out what it thinks your audience will do. Your audience is not made up of average people. They are very specific. So to even get to the point where a social media strategy is applicable, you have to drill down exactly who your customer is. And then you have to know your exact goals. Someone who is not as familiar with social media marketing is likely to put into AI that their audience is everyone and their goal is increase sales. That is going to get you the most average social media strategy you’ve ever seen that won’t be responsive to anything. And there won’t be anyone there to see that so it can be fixed.
On the other hand, a social media consultant will put together all of the research aspects needed to get you a responsive social media strategy. Although they may use AI, it will be an aid on certain technical aspects rather than having it do all the work. But then they can use their experience and knowledge of social media networks to get the strategy to the point where it makes sense for your particular audience. You can then actually create something unique and anything but average.
Social media posting
A lot of news organizations have taken to using AI to do their social media posting, and it shows. In most of these cases, there is not a human overseeing things, and once again, it shows.
When I post for a client, I check things over when I schedule to make sure that it looks correct. That’s a quick once over of link, image, caption, etc. Of course it’s dependent on what the particular post is as to what I check. But basically, I make sure that everything works. And after the post is live, I re-do all of my checks. Because there can be glitches and I need to be sure that none of them affect a post.
When you rely on AI to make sure things are properly posted, that’s when those glitches can really start affecting your social media. Both the network and the AI system can cause those glitches, which will make them more frequent. I’ve seen wrong photos, broken links and several other details just go wrong. A human who is constantly checking these details really does make a huge difference.
Writing posts
The role of captions is to bring context to the image or video and to get your audience to take action. That action varies. It could be as simple as clicking a link or an even further commitment like purchasing a product. Whatever it is, you are trying to get your audience to do something.
The way that AI writes captions is by looking at many, many existing captions and creating something from what has been fed into it. And that’s why it’s going to give you something very mediocre for you to post. Yes, you can put in certain prompts to make it better, but it’s never going to be much better than mediocre since it’s not based on original thought.
Posts that a social media consultant has written, on the other hand, should have emotions and other qualities that AI just can’t duplicate. And those kinds of details make a post stand out from the crowd and are more likely to get your audience to take action. They’ll feel the human-ness in the post and be more attracted to read about what it has to say. I have always said that an audience is more likely to take action on a not-perfect post. The latest crop of AI posts are proving me right time and time again. There are a lot of reasons behind this. But it all boils down to that the human-ness should not be beaten out of posts. It should be celebrated since it’s what attracts your audience to your posts.
And more!
Look, I could go on and on about times when the empathy of an actual person is absolutely necessary for social media. But I hope the above reasons would be good enough.
In the end, a human is necessary to make the connections and correct the mistakes that pop up. AI is best when a social media consultant uses it to make them more efficient. It shouldn’t replace them entirely.
Did you try to replace a social media consultant with AI? How did it work for you?