During a recent CIM member exclusive webinar, CIM Course Director Steph Inez Matthews discussed the integration of AI in social media marketing. She emphasised the importance of staying updated with AI advancements to future-proof marketing strategies and improve efficiency in marketing teams.
Steph Inez Matthews is a strategic growth consultant for purpose-led brands, agencies, and people. She has experience working with major brands like Warner Brothers, Tesco, TikTok, and Meta, and now runs several training courses for CIM, focusing on AI and social media, responsible marketing and brand strategy.
Current adoption of AI in social media
There has been a widespread adoption of AI in marketing in recent years; it is proven to drive efficiency and effectiveness in marketing, with 34% of respondents in recent data citing significant improvements in marketing outcomes.
Inez Matthews began the webinar by conducting a poll to gauge attendees’ use of AI in social media, with 85% already using AI as part of their social media strategy. Most social media platforms, like TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest, now offer AI-enabled tools to enhance content creation and campaign efficiency.
Generative AI in creative
AI helps to make creativity accessible; anyone can use it, not just agency professionals. AI enables experimentation, agility and personalisation in content creation. It simplifies workflows due to automation, or frees up time by being a creative thinking partner.
Generative AI can elevate full-funnel creative excellence, driving more content production and insights, and many major brands are using AI in their creative now, including Coca-Cola’s Christmas adverts and Heinz’s use of OpenAI’s DALL-E to create campaigns.
The art of the prompt
However, as AI in content creation becomes more mainstream, there is a rise in AI slop content that has led to many consumers becoming hesitant to trust AI content, particularly when there is no human oversight.
It’s about quality, not quantity. Inez Matthews explained how crafting effective prompts for AI tools ensures consistent and contextual outputs. The key elements of a prompt are:
- Role
- Task
- Audience
- Content
- Expectation
Prompting is a fine art, experimenting with the tools is the quickest way to learn, and you can ask AI for feedback on how you can create better prompts. Inez Matthews recommended using examples to anchor expectations and treat the prompting process as an iterative creative briefing. Turn prompting into a conversation with AI tools and refine your prompt for a better final output.
AI text models
The webinar introduced various AI text models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's CoPilot. Many AI tools have free models, but these can come with limitations, and the premium subscriptions often provide better quality outputs. Inez Matthews provided an overview of these popular AI text models and their specific capabilities and strengths.
Claude is a great tool for writing, whereas ChatGPT is better for overall performance. But using a combination of different tools is a good idea, as they all excel at different tasks. Inez Matthews’ advice was to be across all the different tools to stay ahead, rather than focusing all efforts into just one. She recommended using middleware tools like Adobe Firefly and Artsy to access multiple AI models.
AI image and video models
AI text-to-image models were also introduced during the session, such as Google's Nano Banana, Adobe Firefly, and OpenAI's DALL-E to name a few. There are also lots of text-to-video tools, like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Voyager, and Meta's Make.
As with text models, many AI image and video models often require a paid subscription for better outputs, but the quality that AI can produce now is unparalleled, it is getting harder and harder to spot AI generated content.
Embedding AI into your strategy
AI can automate many social media tasks like scheduling, optimisation, content creation and moderation. Inez Matthews suggested starting with adding AI into simple tasks and gradually incorporating it into more a complex content creation process or automation.
AI and automation are already integrated into some of the social media management tools that you might use, but platforms like n8n, Zapier, and String.com can also create bespoke automated workflows with AI agents.
While AI is a powerful tool, human oversight is also critical to maintain brand consistency and avoid AI slop.
Social media is the external face of the brand, it could be the first touchpoint where customers see your brand, so it is a huge risk to fully automate social media management.
Balancing AI and human creativity
Inez Matthews advised marketers to stay up to date with AI advancements and encouraged the use of AI as a tool to optimise strategy and production processes, but also warned attendees of the ethical considerations that come with AI use.
AI-driven marketing must be used responsibly, marketers must be transparent with their AI usage to clients and consumers, and also consider their use of data, especially on free versions of AI tools.
Building your AI literacy skills is the best way to stay updated and safe, whether it is through formal training, self-learning or sharing best practises within your team.
Final thoughts
AI is no longer a tool for the future, but a practical, powerful partner you can implement now. Embedding AI into your social media workflows can help create scroll-stopping content that genuinely resonates with your audience and increases efficiency in your team.
To help you get started using AI in your social media management, follow these three key takeaways:
Choose your tool: Use different AI models for different tasks and ensure AI-generated content aligns with brand guidelines.
Keep talking: Train your AI tool with your website or social content so it has some context and have a conversation to perfect your prompts.
Don’t let robots take over: Use AI as a tool to enhance marketing strategies and content production, but don’t lose the essential human oversight.
CIM members can watch back the webinar recording now, or anyone can sign up for CIM’s AI for Social Media training course to learn how to use AI to plan, create and optimise social media activity.
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