Episode 5: AI and Social Media

Want ideas on how marketing professionals are actually using AI in their daily life? Listen in to digital marketing expert, Will Francis and SEO consultant Danny Richman chat about what's new in how AI is affecting marketing.

In this episode after chatting about the lack of blow-away tools for social media use, Danny offers to build a FREE AI-based tool for social media! What would you like to use to make your day-to-day social media life easier? 

You can also watch our earlier webinar with Will, Danny and Clark Boyd where they dig deep into what ChatGPT really means for marketers.

“There's so many opportunities out there for people to build these things, you know, and it's quite surprising that a lot of the software companies that already have those users are not capitalizing on this more.” Danny

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Video Transcript

Will Francis  00:04

I think there are probably some other ways that social media managers and marketers are going to be helped by this technology. What do you see coming down the line?

Danny Richman  00:14

well, not much to be honest with you, I mean, social media, I have to be honest, is not something I spend a huge amount of for other than my own personal Twitter feed. It's not something I do any work in. And so I don't share a lot of the kind of the challenges and frustrations that social media managers must be dealing with on a daily basis. However, having spoken to some people that work in that field, and understanding what they're dealing with each day, you know, there are so many different things I think could be done. I mean, the only things I've seen really kind of made available is like content writing. So you've got tools, things like Canva, and stuff like that, where you want to make a social post, and it will have something that will generate the heading for you, the tweet or whatever is the content is going on there.

But I think there's so much more that you could do with these tools, that would be really interesting. And I haven't seen it available. For example, a tool I've maybe mentioned this before on previous episodes, a tool that I always really liked playing with is SparkToro, which is an audience research tool. So you can go and put in anything that defines your audience, you can say they follow a certain social account, they visit a particular website, they have a certain job title. And it will then find 1000s of people that are within that audience and give you a whole load of really useful data about those people, including things like the hashtags that they're using most frequently when they're posting online, the phrases they're using most frequently, all kinds of stuff. We could then take that data, we could then go and shove that into GPT. And knowing that these are all topics of interest to that particular audience, we can then use that to create new tweets and new posts based on things that they are currently talking about

Will Francis  02:19

like competitively, like you could look at what you have your competitors' audience responds to.

Danny Richman  02:26

I mean, just, you know, taking all these different data feeds. I mean, another thing as well, that social media managers have to work with are things like social holiday calendars, where you've got - in fact, I think the Digital Marketing Institute has a really great spreadsheet that you can download - that lists all these things like National Donut Day, and all these kinds of different events that are coming up all the time. So you know, having that in, say, for example, a Google Sheet, that data in a Google Sheet, where you also define what your company does, who your audience is, and then using GPT, to then come up with really interesting content topics and tweets and things that could be posted out that use the data from the holiday calendar but are targeted, and absolutely suitable for the audience that you're trying to reach and applicable to your business.

Danny Richman  03:27

And if that (tool) doesn't exist, it really should do because it's not something that would be difficult to produce. And maybe people listening to this... I've got a little bit of time on my hands now that I've got Fabric Genie launched and out of the way, I have got a little bit of time free. So if that's something that would be helpful to people, please let us know. Because it's something that I would be very happy to make available in a Google Sheet free for people to download.

Will Francis  03:56

That sounds amazing. I mean, I have worked on social media quite a bit and that that is exactly the kind of thing that would be a great baseline, you know, a great starter for a content plan. It'd be something that you'd want to obviously tweak yourself. But out of the box, I can imagine that GPT would probably get that 80 to 90% right, you know? And I think that'd be invaluable.

Danny Richman  04:23

I mean, especially if we can do it with a version with a GPT model that is then linked to live web data as well. So it's not just kind of based on stuff for 2021. That could be stuff there could be some really interesting things we could do with that. So, yes, so maybe if there is a demand for an app for that out there and people let us know. And then I'll show it to you Will, and you can give me some feedback. .

Will Francis  04:46

Absolutely, I'd love that. You know on a similar topic, though, and again, I have not seen this I've seen maybe this creeping into analytics products. But social listening seems absolutely ripe for GPT to come and ingest that information i.e. what people are saying en masse in social media, right? About a brand or any topic or key word, but specifically about your brand about your products or services about your industry and about your competitors  - ingest that, understand it make sense of it. Because GPT is a sensemaking engine, in a lot of ways. It can make sense of nebulous, messy, disorganized, just big piles of verbal information. And I think to be able to ingest that, make sense of it and break it down, do some basic sentiment analysis or that kind of thing, keyword analysis, and actually, in some ways that could feed into content planning in certain situations as well. So it does seem that, anything semantic basically. And GPT is your friend, right?

Danny Richman  05:58

Yeah, I mean, if I had been working in the world of social media, rather than the world of Search, I have no doubt that I would have already released tons and tons of free sheets and scripts and made them all available to do all kinds of different things that frustrated me and might be helpful to other people. I just don't work in social media. These are things I'm not hugely familiar with. So yeah, if people can let me know, what problem they're experiencing, you know, this is not something I'm trying to do on any kind of commercial basis. So yeah, just let me know about some things that might be helpful and see what we can put together.

Something else I understand that people who work in social and comms, is also making sure that everything that goes out conforms to a certain brand voice brand style. That kind of thing as well is an area where I think language models could really help as well as making sure that everything that goes out, you know

Will Francis  07:06

Yeah you have a brand guardian, basically, that you've built on GPT, I can see that working really well. That's interesting, actually, because a lot of bigger brands have their brand really thoroughly encoded in the form of design systems or brand guidelines that these days are mostly public, you know. If you want to find out what Starbucks's tone of voice is there's pages of it online, on their corporate website. So yes, there's probably something around that as well, actually, tone of voice is a really interesting one. Or if you had a coffee shop, and you said, I want to sound a bit like Starbucks, but it would with a little bit of this or that you could get it to ingest: now we've got browsing capability with GPT, you could get it to go and read Starbucks's online tone of voice guidelines, and then adapt it to your brand. And then filter your plans, social media updates, or something and rewrite them or check them. I mean, again, it's semantics, isn't it?

Danny Richman  08:11

There's so many opportunities out there for people to build these things, you know, and it's quite surprising that a lot of the software companies that already have those users are not capitalizing on this more.

Will Francis  08:25

Yeah, it's funny because every SAS business's next feature is AI, isn't it? Everybody's talking about like their new feature being some AI-powered thing. But I think the quicker wins are perhaps more around content creation, I think that's perhaps where we'll get more obvious value. But clearly, in the analysis, there is more and we will see - I saw this morning that there's a podcast analytics firm and host called sprinkler but they are actually doing sort of what I'm talking about where they're using GPT to look at mentions of your podcast in social, ingest that and sum it up and perform some basic sentiment analysis, I think. So I think we'll just see more of it coming in the coming weeks and months, really.

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