05 Jun The Rise of AI Copywriting: A New Era for Social Media
Holy shit. That was our first reaction when ChatGPT came out in November 2022. Somewhat surprised, we watched as a colleague had a love letter written for his girlfriend. Within 10 seconds, a romantic story of no less than four paragraphs rolled out, with sweet phrases like, “From the very first moment I saw you, I knew something special was happening.”
The letter was still quite general, but when we started adding character traits, hobbies and quirks, what emerged was a letter that many a Casanova could learn from. The colleague forwarded it to his girlfriend, and she was, to say the least, quite surprised. “It was the sweetest note she had ever received from her boyfriend (uhh… computer),” he says. A little experiment that leads to the question: what does AI mean for copywriting in social?
Thanks to AI, we work faster, spend less time on repetitive jobs and have more time for the work that genuinely energises us: developing creative and innovative social content. Thus, AI helps us get inspired. A brainstorm often starts with divergence – writing down as many associations as possible to create surprising combinations. We now use AI for that. The tool shows associations within seconds that we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves quickly, leading us to new insights.
AI also helps with SEO. We use it for keyword research, structuring texts and writing in ‘natural language’ to avoid keyword stuffing. Anything to make your content rank higher on social platforms, such as Pinterest. Research also takes much less time. Delving into subject matter becomes a lot easier by using AI. Let AI summarise your sources into bite-sized chunks. This way, you will get to the desired result faster.
But there are, of course, some snags in this tool. Empathy, fact-checking and creativity are examples that AI still struggles with. Problems that even a trained user still runs into. Indeed, AI tools initially choose a middle ground from everything they find online. We still have to adjust machines a lot to achieve truly distinctive work. In addition, ChatGPT only shows information up to September 2021 for now. So for the latest TikTok trends, we don’t have to turn to it (yet). But the question is: for how long?
Artificial intelligence is increasingly learning to mimic human emotions, but for copy to resonate among the target audience, you must be able to walk in their shoes. What resonates with the target audience? What do they gravitate towards? What are they looking at? You need to understand the target audience and engage with them. That is what we have our community managers for. They are in contact with our target group day and night, and we get incredibly useful insights from that. But even with the focus groups we are now conducting with Gen Z, we gain information we wouldn’t be able to with AI. It is so valuable to hear an opinion through verbal and non-verbal communication. Thankfully, computers are not replacing this kind of human contact (yet).
In short, artificial intelligence has much to offer as a tool. AI works faster and has more computing power and information at its disposal than a human. But the machine still needs to be controlled. It requires creativity to put thoughts into words, knowledge to prompt properly and expertise to judge whether something is good. Fortunately for us because that is where our added value lies!