ChatGPT Social Media Impact

For anyone who spends much time on the internet, talking to robots has become a surprisingly common – even mundane – experience. But what happens when the AI gets smart enough that you’re not even sure who is human, and who is machine responding? That’s why a new bot has got the online world abuzz – with ChatGPT social media impact is a hot topic for marketers everywhere.

Launched by Google spin-off lab OpenAI, this new AI tool has the potential to rapidly change the way businesses approach copy and content due to its higher level of sophistication. The first thing you’ll notice – especially those used to the relatively clunky chatbots that infest customer service systems everywhere – is its ability to understand and generate natural language. Since its launch, it’s found its way into many fields, including social media.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the impact of ChatGPT on social media, its use cases, potential issues, and why you should never be 100% reliant on AI for social media.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT, short for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that can perform a staggering amount of tasks to a surprising degree of competency. This ranges from researching college essays to writing a Mint mobile ad in the style of Ryan Reynolds (later to be read by the actual Ryan Reynolds).

Previous chatbots and NLP models were pretty easy to spot – built on rule-based systems, programmed with a set of predefined rules and keywords.  As anyone who has tried to use a bot to get a straight answer knows, this made them pretty limited in their ability to understand and respond to the nuances and context of human language. In the same way, they struggled to generate fluent and coherent text, resulting in responses that ranged from unreadable to unintentionally hilarious.

The shift with ChatGPT comes from moving to a neural network architecture known as a transformer, which allows it to understand and generate text in a more human-like way. The model has been trained on a massive amount of text data, helping it ‘understand’ the context and meaning behind a request and generate more personalized responses.

How to Use ChatGPT

One of the reasons ChatGPT has blown up in the public sphere, gaining prominence beyond the realm of futurist tech moguls, is its usability. It’s free, open to everyone, and, honestly, pretty fun to play around with.

However, like any tool that can do a million things, the trick lies in making it do what you actually need. Also, despite being extremely competent for what it is, it still requires a level of human guidance, contextual supervision, and technical understanding to properly use and integrate into your social media strategy.

Here’s how to get started using ChatGPT:

1. Sign up for an account at chat.openai.com – Google and Microsoft users can use their IDs to sign up instantly.
2. Start talking to the AI and it will respond with human-like answers. It’s important to note that the responses will be based on the data that the AI has been trained on – which only runs to late 2021 – so it’s important to provide it with clear and specific prompts.
3. Interactions with ChatGPT are organized into chats – the best results come from training the bot within the chat with specific content and use-case information. This will help the AI understand your brand’s tone and messaging and generate responses that align with it.

It’s important to note that ChatGPT is not a replacement for your oversight and decision-making. While it can assist with ideating and analyzing content, it doesn’t ‘know’ your business, customers, or needs.

How is ChatGPT Being Used in Social Media?

For teams managing wide-ranging social content campaigns, ChatGPT has an exciting range of use cases when it comes to social media:

Ad content creation

Generating highly personalized and engaging ad copies, headlines, and even video scripts at scale, or creating captions for images and videos, making them more attention-grabbing and shareable.

Organic content creation

ChatGPT can be used to ideate and write blog posts, articles, and even social media posts. This can be improved by pre-training it with existing content, allowing it to understand your brand’s tone and messaging.

Analyzing social media data

Feeding it large amounts of posts, ChatGPT can perform sentiment analysis, brand monitoring, and even trend analysis. This can help businesses make more informed decisions about their social media strategy and marketing campaigns.

Crisis management

For stressful moments with a lot of contexts to manage, ChatGPT can analyze relevant negative comments, customer service reviews, or reporting to suggest relevant responses.

Use Cases of ChatGPT for Social Media

In exploring with our clients, we’ve found ChatGPT to be particularly useful for repetitive tasks and at-scale content editing:

Scaling personalized content

When you’re looking to roll out a consistent message while still personalizing your approach, ChatGPT can suggest content variations by audience, giving alternatives by market, persona, and use case.

Sentiment analysis

When it comes to finding common themes and insights, ChatGPT can analyze customer feedback and complaints to identify patterns in customer sentiment, which can be used to improve your social media strategy and online review management.

Ideation and innovation

As anyone writing a large volume of posts knows, coming up with fresh ideas can be draining, leaving you stuck in a rut of rinsing and repeating the same phrases. ChatGPT can be a great way to refresh your approach, offering you alternatives based on your ideas.

Potential Issues with ChatGPT for Social Media

While ChatGPT has many benefits for social media teams, it’s by no means a perfect tool. Some of the most common potential issues include:

The AI back box

Given the complex architecture, it’s hard to gauge your control over the content generated by ChatGPT. As the AI is based on the data it’s been trained on, it may not always generate content that aligns with your brand’s values and messaging, so reviewing it is always key.

Lack of context

ChatGPT isn’t keyed in live to your audience and may not always understand the nuances of social media conversations and may generate responses that are off-topic or inappropriate. It is a robot after all.

Lack of creativity

Without the proper prompts and guidance, ChatGPT can produce some pretty dull content. If you’ve spent years working on just the right tone of voice, don’t let it be washed away in a sea of identical robot-speak.

Why You Should Never Be 100% Reliant on AI for Social Media

While AI like ChatGPT can be a valuable asset for businesses, we strongly advise against relying on it completely. Social media strategy is all about human connection. While ChatGPT can make a good impression, it’s not the same as using human insight, customer knowledge, and feeling to guide your approach.

Human touch is needed

While you can feed ChatGPT all the content in the world – and OpenAI got close – there’s a ton of information that just isn’t available to it, from customer histories, to human foibles to empathy. We use information every day in our interactions that can’t be found anywhere but in our minds, and that’s what makes your brand human.

AI can’t replace creativity

While ChatGPT can generate a wide range of content, it’s really a synthesis tool, rather than true creation. Ask it to tell a joke and you get some pretty weird answers. Strong brand connections rely on storytelling, something beyond the current capabilities of AI.

Ethical and legal responsibility

As a business, you have a responsibility to ensure that the content generated you put out is ethical, legal, and in compliance with relevant regulations. This includes issues such as data privacy, bias and discrimination, and transparency, which can lead to problems with social media moderation and inappropriate content being posted. ChatGPT has been programmed to be aware of some of these, but accountability – and legal risk – ultimately sits with you.

So, now what?

Clearly, ChatGPT is an exciting tool that has the potential to shift the way businesses approach copy and content creation – and you should be using it. It’s easy to use, powerful in its capabilities and has massive potential. It’s also pretty darn fun. But it’s important to remember that no AI can replace human oversight and decision-making, and it may not be long before we start seeing some notable social media gaffes from overzealous teams who put too many eggs in ChatGPT’s well-intentioned-but-limited basket.

Social media is the public face of modern business, so it’s essential to balance the judicious use of AI tools with a human touch. If you need help navigating the world of ChatGPT and want to see how it can enhance your social media strategy, book a meeting to get started with our social media experts.