19 June 2025
By Katie Crocker
Katie Crocker is a Director at Spark & Forge Marketing. Part brand powerhouse, Part industry incubator. Delivering standout campaigns, bold strategy, and design that cuts through, while actively forging new talent pipelines through live briefs, placements, and mentoring.
Generative AI (GenAI) has become a major talking point globally since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
According to the British Chambers of Commerce, the majority of Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are not using AI. This presents a huge opportunity for early adopters to become familiar with AI and utilise it ahead of their competition.
Why should I use AI in my social media?
Using AI to supplement your business social media strategy and content correctly, can lead to increased efficiency, easier idea generation, reduced costs and reduced turnaround time.
34% of respondents for a McKinsey survey are now regularly using GenAI in their Marketing and Sales. The use of both generative and analytical AI is leading to increased revenue.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a widely used abbreviation for a subset of Deep Learning known as Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM). As technology progresses, these two subsets are increasingly crossing over. Examples include Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot and ChatGPT. For this blog, we will use GenAI to refer to these tools.
AI is the wider technology of computers simulating human intelligence. AI, in the modern sense, was brought to the forefront by Alan Turning in the 1930s, and we still use the Turing Test to measure computer-based intelligence.
AI has been available for consumers in tools such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. They had very limited functionality, only being able to search for an answer and sourcing directly from the internet.
What can I use GenAI for in my social media?
GenAI can be used for a number of different purposes within your social media from helping to generate business specific ideas to proof reading your existing work.
You can use GenAI in your social media to:
- Start the blank page – Emails, Blogs, Social Media copy
- Analyse anonymised data e.g. social media analytics
- Create a marketing plan and strategy
- Repurpose existing content for other platforms
- Create marketing personas
What tools can I use to get started for free?
How can I use GenAI for Social Media?
The Basics:
Ensure your prompts are specific. The more specific your prompt, the more likely you will get helpful information back.
Google has a great introduction to how to craft a prompt to GenAI using a framework of: Persona, Task, Context, Format.
Other prompt engineers suggest including examples and tone for additional prompting and refining.
How to:
Start with Research.
A great social media strategy should start with research into market trends and competitors.
Utilise GenAI to ask questions to help you such as:
“You are a digital marketing strategist for a small e-commerce business. Please ask questions that targets a social media marketing research plan pre strategy.”
You can also ask GenAI to help generate customer personas which aid in targeting your strategy.
- Create a Strategy.
For example, “You are a digital marketing strategist for a small e-commerce business. Please ask questions to create a digital marketing strategy” contains Persona, Task and Context and Format.
By answering these questions about your business, you will have goals and a strategy in place.
If you need further clarification about a question, you can ask your GenAI to give specific examples.
- Create tone of voice and brand guidelines for creating cohesive social media.
Don’t have Brand Guidelines? Don’t worry! Ask GenAI to help create some!
If you have existing blog or social media content, ask your GenAI tool to use analyse your posts and copy to come up with a tone of voice document. If you are starting from scratch, ask GenAI to ask you questions that would be helpful in creating these guidelines.
- Train your GenAI with data and your internal documentation to generate ideas.
By using your research, marketing strategy, and tone of voice document you can craft a prompt such as:
“You are a digital marketing strategist. Using the research, marketing strategy and tone of voice documents attached, generate a content marketing plan for the next 90 days. As a business, we are going to focus on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook organic content.”
This will give business specific ideas that are in line with your marketing strategy.
What common mistakes should small businesses avoid when using GenAI tools?
Not having a marketing strategy with goals in place.
Without direction, your business won’t enjoy all the benefits a marketing strategy brings. Brand trust is built through social media with a global average of 88% of consumers saying it was important for them to trust brands they purchased or used.
- Generic Prompting.
If you are using a generic prompt such as “Create 3 Facebook posts about shoes” will not generate business specific ideas.
Prompt with direction and thought.
- Using directly generated content on Social Media Platforms.
27% of UK adults would block or unfollow account with content that is labelled as GenAI generated. Some social media platforms have already started to add labels to flag GenAI content to their users.
Use GenAI as your assistant to bounce ideas around but keep your content original.
- LLMs use American English.
Ensure you read through the outputs of GenAI to ensure that they match your tone of voice brand guidelines. Even if you tell the models to use British English, it will sometimes still return American English.
- If you are asking GenAI for facts, check them.
There are two things to watch out for here:
As GenAI pull information from the internet, it can pull from misinformation and return this as fact with a source. It is your responsibility to ensure that the data is correct. The best way to avoid this is to not ask your GenAI for facts and figures and still use search engines if you want specific information.
There are also errors known as hallucinations. Hallucinations are where an GenAI generates incorrect information as a confident response.
- Don’t upload sensitive information.
OpenAI train their models using select publicly available data and proprietary data from data partnerships. They may also use your content to train its models.
You must also abide by your business’s privacy policy and The Data Protection Act. The best rule of thumb is If you are not comfortable posting the information on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus, Don’t enter it into a GenAI!
I feel nervous about introducing GenAI – What can I do?
Firstly, have a go! There are several GenAI tools you can use for free listed above. Start small and build up.
Secondly, look for a course. There are a number of online courses available that can give more in-depth information on how to use GenAI tools and how you can apply it in your business.
Some examples are:
What upcoming GenAI innovations could revolutionize social media marketing?
Used well, GenAI will streamline your social media administration, never let you start with a blank page again, and be your Social Media Consultant in your pocket.
In 2025, adopting AI-driven personalisation where emails and ads are personalised with dynamic content will take your social media use and business to the next level. Are you using GenAI in your Social Media? How are you going to use it 2025?