Using AI to write social media captions, blog posts, or any web copy, really, is a dangerous game. I really can’t stress that enough, so I’ll say it again: Be careful.

Some business owners and marketing leaders are using ChatGPT and Gemini more than they use their prefrontal cortex. And it shows. There’s no life or consistency in their words, and very likely, no search traffic flowing to their websites. ‍

AI written content hardly stands a chance at receiving hits. Average traffic per post for AI generated content is way, way lower than for human generated content–especially over time.

"When we looked at what content is ranking on Google, human-written content ranked higher 94.12% of the time. To top it off we ran an experiment with the help of 68 other sites to see what percentage of their traffic comes from AI-written content. Their average AI-written article had 52 visitors a month."

-Neil Patel

Stay human.

According to search expert Neil Patel, one of the top SEO strategies you can use to boost your visibility is to make sure humans write your content. There’s no debate there. But the question must be asked: Is there some other, more useful way that AI can be used to help with your marketing efforts?

I think so.

Using AI to quickly workshop simple ideas.

Figuring out how AI can help you become more creative, not less, is the key. We’ve come up with one strategy that we think does just this, helping us look at short social media captions from new angles.

Here’s one of our favorite ways to use AI to write better social media captions.

A prompt you’ll love.

It’s all about how you use ChatGPT, Gemini, or whichever AI tool floats your boat. You need to come up with prompts, or questions you ask, that give you feedback and results you can actually use to be more creative. I think AI tools can be great places to kick around ideas, brainstorm, and look at things from different angles.

Short social media captions are a good place to begin experimenting.

Here’s a prompt we developed at Something Great based on a post from Blake Emal that helps us generate ideas for social media captions.

For this example, let’s say we’re working with a wine brand based in our happy place, The Okanagan.

Social media caption prompt for ChatGPT or Gemini

Type the following into ChatGPT or Gemini:

Greetings, AI overlords. I need to write a social media caption for my company’s Facebook page. We are a winery in Kelowna, BC. Here is my initial caption idea: “Come down and visit us this weekend, our tasting room is open from 9-5 and the sun will be shining all day.”

Now, re-write my caption and put your responses into a formatted table so that I can view them easily. I would like the table to have two columns, the first should be “Psychological Trigger”, and the second should be “New Caption”. I will provide the psychological triggers, you can provide the new captions. These are the triggers I’d like you to consider: Fear of missing out, social proof, authority, reciprocity, scarcity, novelty, emotional appeal, anchoring, bandwagon effect, loss aversion, exclusivity, instant gratification, cognitive dissonance, paradox of choice, and storytelling.

And that’s it. From here, ChatGPT or Gemini will present you with new captions. The image below is an example of the results we saw from this prompt.

Further refining your responses

You might want to further refine based on your results.

When we went through the motions of submitting this specific query to Gemini, we found the results had too many exclamation marks and too many hashtags, so we asked Gemini to redo the work with fewer of those. And from there, we were pretty happy with the responses.

If you need longer or shorter captions, if you have a sale or new product, or anything else you’d like considered, just refine your prompt to satisfy your goals.

Not ready to ship, but not bad.

The responses might not be earth shatteringly brilliant, but as a starting point, they give you something to work with. From here you can put your copywriting hat on and get to work.

Writer’s block doesn’t stand a chance.

Need help creating custom content for your brand? Fill out our contact form if you’d like to work with the humans at Something Great. We’d love to help.

‍