5 Essential AI Prompting Tips for Social Media Marketing Managers in 2023

Artificial intelligence is exploding in just about every industry. Folks from all walks of life have been using AI to create stylized avatars, award-winning art, children’s books, even commercials! 

If harnessing the power of this new technology sounds intimidating, don’t worry! This post covers 5 Essential AI Prompting Tips for Social Media Marketing Managers to save time and scale their content workflows.

If you’re new to AI and want to learn more about available tools and how they can be used in social media marketing, check out our webinar on Using AI to Enhance Your Social Media Management Workflows.

Tip 1 - Master the Basics of Prompting

One skill and content thread we’ve seen emerge online revolves around crafting effective prompts. The process of prompting is very much a trial-and-error process. But keep these AI prompting basics in mind, and you’ll be off to a great start.

It helps to think of writing prompts as creating instructions for a quirky robot eager to please but needs teaching and guidance to do exactly what you want.

A good rule of thumb is to keep your prompts as simple and direct as possible. You can ask AI to do many things, but if you ask too much at once, your results will be diluted and possibly unusable.

You can also choose to keep your prompts open or close-ended. Open-ended prompts give the artificial intelligence software more freedom of interpretation. This can provide fresh and surprising responses but also risks deviating far from your intended idea.

This is where close-ended prompts come into play. Close-ended prompts give AI more restrictions or parameters to abide by. This allows you to set specific “rules” you want the AI to follow to fine-tune your results.

An example of a simple, open-ended AI prompt would be, “write a social media post about AI” 

A more closed example would be, “write a social media post about how AI can help marketers, 280 character limit”.

Here are the differences between the two results using Canva's Magic Write AI tool. As you can see, adding more specific variables is key to helping AI create usable content.

As you get more familiar with the kind of results you get from your prompts, you can add in variables such as context to hone your prompts, which we’ll discuss next.

Tip 2 - Use Context and Tone to Shape Your AI Prompts

Once you’ve mastered the basics of AI prompting, you can add context to tailor your results. Context can range from creating content with a specific goal, like subscribing to a newsletter, or educating the reader about a specific point.

You can also use contextual prompts to change your content's tone, personality, or perspective. Try asking your preferred AI tool to write content simulating an expert. You can also ask AI to adopt an opposing viewpoint, challenge conventional wisdom, or adopt a specific tone.

Here’s an example: “Write a blog post about how social media managers can use AI to reach new clients, helpful tone, simulate a marketing expert”

Consider context as the big, overarching guidelines you want your content to stay within. If your content revolves around a specific topic or theme, like social media management, you can instruct AI to stay within that context in your prompts.

Let’s build off our previous example: “Write a blog post about how social media managers can use AI to reach new clients, include a newsletter subscribe call to action.” 

This context will narrow the information collected and the output, allowing you to tweak your message for specific audiences.

Tip 3 - Use AI to Brainstorm & Jumpstart Content

Did you know that artificial intelligence is amazing for busting through creative blocks and generating new ideas?

Social media marketing managers looking for new content can use AI to rapidly brainstorm headlines, topics, or post ideas. You can also ask AI to generate outlines, and mind maps, or take a different approach to the topic simply by asking it!

Here’s an example: “Brainstorm 5 blog post ideas for social media marketers using artificial intelligence.”

Let’s take one of the results and ask for an outline with this prompt: “Write a blog post outline about using AI to Improve Your Social Media Content Strategy.”

You can then use the results to jumpstart your post. You can then use AI to fill out the bullet points!

Tip 4 - Train Your AI With Your Existing Content

Artificial intelligence is so versatile that you can even teach it to create content with your tone and style.

By feeding your preferred AI tool a piece of existing content, you can capture your writing style to apply to your AI-generated content. One benefit of this technique is that your AI-generated content will fit more seamlessly into your brand with less massaging. 

Another major benefit is the ability to quickly capture and apply brand tone to copy, which can be especially useful to SMMs managing multiple accounts with unique voices.

You can also ask AI to add human writing techniques to your copy by asking it to incorporate good advice you’ve read elsewhere. To do this, you can include the snippet in your prompt or provide a URL link (called “seeding”).

Here’s an example: write a social media post about how to use AI in social media marketing using the advice found on this post: https://blog.cloudcampaign.com/5-essential-ai-prompting-tips-for-social-media-marketing-managers-in-2023/.

Tip 5 - Practice and Save Your Prompts!

With AI writing tools, copywriting has become even easier and faster than ever. AI writing prompts can generate thousands of new ideas in seconds, giving you endless ideas. However, practicing and saving your AI writing prompts is essential to maximize this valuable resource.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, AI prompting is a trial-and-error process. Saving and iterating on your prompts gives you a visual track of your process while teaching you as you go.

By saving your AI writing prompts, you can easily access them later and refer back to them whenever you need inspiration or refer back to what’s worked well.

This approach allows you to quickly access and build on the best ideas to create an even better draft. Additionally, saving your AI writing prompts lets you easily track your progress.

Moreover, saving your AI writing prompts can save you time and money. By having access to your past AI writing prompts, you can quickly refer back to them and use them as a starting point for your next project. This is especially useful if you have clients in similar markets or industries. 

This saves you time by ensuring you don’t have to start from scratch for each project. Furthermore, you can use the same AI writing prompts for multiple projects, saving you from having to craft new prompts every time.

Saving your AI writing prompts is essential for making the most of this valuable resource, and we recommend compiling a “cheat sheet” of your most useful prompts for quick access.

Conclusion

We hope these 5 Essential AI Prompting Tips for Social Media Marketing Managers have equipped you with the tools you need to get the most from this amazing technology.

Did you know that AI is a perfect match for Cloud Campaign, our scalable social media management platform? Click here to try us for two weeks FREE. Schedule time with our award-winning Customer Success team to get the most from your trial.