AI has made average content incredibly easy to create and I think that's going to change social media more than almost anything else.

For years, one of the biggest challenges for organisations was simply producing enough content. You had to come up with an idea. Write the caption. Design the graphic. Edit the wording. Get it approved. Schedule it.

For a small business owner doing their own marketing, or the one communications person in a charity juggling seventeen other things, that was genuinely hard.

Now, you can just open ChatGPT and ask: "Write me five Facebook posts about our upcoming event." Thirty seconds later, you've got them.

They're grammatically correct. There's probably something about being "thrilled to announce" and an invitation to "join us on this incredible journey."

And the problem is that they're completely forgettable.

AI has solved the problem of producing content but It hasn't solved the problem of producing content anyone actually cares about. That is always going to be the hard part and the part that requires an actual skilled human who understands their audience.

For libraries, community organisations, not-for-profits and small businesses with limited time and resources, AI can make social media much easier to manage.

But easier doesn't automatically mean better.

The internet is about to get very average

The barrier to creating reasonably polished marketing content has fallen dramatically.

That's a good thing in lots of ways. I'm certainly not anti-AI. I use it in my own work and I teach organisations how to use it.

For a tiny team, AI can be brilliant for getting past the blank page, organising messy ideas, repurposing material, proofreading, brainstorming and speeding up repetitive work.

But when everyone has access to the same tools, being able to produce a polished caption is no longer particularly impressive. The question changes from "Can we create enough content?" to "Do we have anything worth saying?"

And that's a much more interesting question.

Is AI-generated social media content bad?

No. AI-generated content isn't inherently bad.

The problem is generic content, and AI has made generic content incredibly cheap and easy to produce.

If you give AI something useful, specific and interesting to work with, it can help you turn that material into strong social media content.

If you ask it to invent everything from scratch, you'll often end up with content that could have come from almost any organisation.

The things AI can't manufacture for you

Think about the organisations you actually enjoy following.

Usually, there's something recognisable about them. You know how they sound. They tell you things you didn't know. They have an interesting opinion. You meet the people behind the organisation. They show you what's actually happening. They're specific, that's where I think the opportunity is now. (Check out The Digital Picnic for a great example of an organisation doing this well).

AI can help you communicate your ideas. But it shouldn't be expected to have your ideas.

Some of your best content is probably hiding in things like:

• a question someone asked your team this morning

• something a customer consistently misunderstands

• an opinion your organisation has developed through years of experience

• an interesting conversation between two staff members

• something that went wrong and what you learned from it

• an unusual part of your work people rarely see

• a story from someone your organisation has helped

• a change you've noticed in your industry or community

• something your CEO, librarian, physio, fundraiser, volunteer or frontline worker knows that most people don't.

None of those starts with: "What should we post on socials this week?"

They start with paying attention to what's already happening inside your organisation.

Why does AI social media content often sound generic?

Because AI only has the information you give it.

If you type: "Give me ten engaging social media posts for a charity" you've given it almost nothing distinctive to work with.

It doesn't know what happened in your organisation yesterday.

It doesn't know the questions your customers keep asking.

It doesn't know what your team has learned through years of doing the work.

It doesn't know the stories your audience would find interesting.

If the input is generic, it's hardly surprising when the output is generic too.

Specific beats polished

Here's an easy test. Compare:

"Our dedicated team is passionate about supporting our community and making a difference every day."

with:

"Every Tuesday morning, Sarah drives 42km around the region delivering food parcels. She knows which dogs will bark at the van, which driveways are impossible to turn around in, and which clients will insist she stays for a cup of tea."

The second one contains something AI could never have invented without somebody first giving it the story. That's what makes it interesting.

It's not that AI-generated content is inherently bad. It's that generic content is becoming incredibly cheap. Specificity is becoming more valuable.

The details that are completely ordinary to you may be exactly what makes the content interesting to somebody outside your organisation.

Use AI at the edges, not at the centre

One way I encourage teams to think about AI is:

The human provides the substance. AI helps with the packaging.

Bring it the messy voice note from your CEO. Paste in the rough story your volunteer emailed you. Tell it what happened at yesterday's event. Give it your actual opinion.

Then use AI to help turn that raw material into something clearer.

That's very different from typing: "Give me ten engaging social media posts for a charity."

One uses AI to amplify what is distinctive about your organisation. The other asks AI to invent a personality for you. And audiences can increasingly tell the difference.

AI can play a useful role in your social media content process.

- Use it to tidy up your wording.
- Ask it to shorten something._
- Use it to turn a longer article into a first draft of a social post.
- Ask it to suggest different ways to structure an idea.
- Use it to pull key points from something you've already written.
- Let it help you turn rough notes into something more readable.

But keep the human thinking at the centre.

The stories, knowledge, experience and opinions should come from your organisation. AI is there to help you communicate them.

A question for your next content planning session

Instead of starting your next meeting with:

"What should we post this month?"

Try asking:

"What have we seen, heard, learned, noticed or talked about lately that our audience might find useful or interesting?"

Write everything down before anyone starts deciding what belongs on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. That's your raw material.

Then work out how to turn it into content.

AI can absolutely help with that second part. But the first part is where the interesting stuff comes from. Because in a world where anyone can create twenty perfectly adequate captions before breakfast, perfectly adequate isn't going to be enough.

The organisations people will pay attention to will be the ones with something distinctly human to say.

If you'd like help developing a practical social media approach that makes good use of AI without losing your organisation's voice, take a look at how I can help.