Looking for ways to improve and improve your social media marketing efforts in 2023?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a variety of key tips and pointers to help you maximize your efforts, as well as key tools and processes you can use to connect with a broader and more receptive audience online. .
In the first post of the series, we discussed how to define a brand purpose statement and how it drives the process forward.
Once that is established, move on to the next element. Explore key industry queries to plan a more effective content approach for both SEO and social posting purposes.
Understand what your audience wants to know and how to meet them in the search process
The key to getting your brand and products in front of your target audience is understanding where people are looking and what they are looking for in relation to your business.
While search optimization is a central consideration here, more and more people are also searching social platforms for more information about a product or business. And then there’s advertising, meeting demands that people weren’t aware of. All of this requires research, understanding both common queries and questions, competitor insights, and how they are offered (or not offered).
So, at a high level, you should first measure the most common queries related to your brand, product, and region.
A great starting point here is Google’s Keyword Planner tool. This provides important insight into search trends related to the terms you enter.
So you need to have at least some idea of the key search terms for your business first, but from there you’ll have a large body of potential search terms, queries, questions to answer in your blog post, and social poll inspiration. corpus can be constructed. , more.
As you can see in these examples, if you were looking to sell basketball shoes, entering “basketball shoes” as your search term would bring up a complete list of related searches, sorted by popularity, competition, and interest trends. can be replaced. more.
For this second list, we’ve removed all directly branded searches. This is to more clearly show generalized trends in content ideas.
As you can see, we have some inspirational tips like “best basketball shoes”, “league basketball shoes” (sneakers worn by NBA players), “best basketball shoes for jumping”.
Based on this, you can get an idea of the direction of your specific content. For example, creating your own video reviews of new sneakers, summarizing the most popular shoes worn by NBA stars, summarizing features based on purpose (running, jumping). ) more.
Answer the Public is also a useful resource, especially if you’re looking for the most common questions.
Enter your search term and Answer the Public will show you a summary of the most frequently asked questions, based on Google autocomplete data.
Another tool to consider here is the Google Trendscheck out the latest trending topics to see if there’s anything relevant for your brand.
You can also search by key terms to get gauges of interest and related queries, or browse popular trends to see if anything is relevant to your business. If it has an angle, it can be a good partnering opportunity and another way to get noticed on social networks.
You can also use ChatGPT to support your research efforts.
ChatGPT’s data is not updated in real time (OpenAI notes that we can only access data up to 2021), so we can’t provide up-to-date insights on search trends, for example.
However, I can provide some notes on general questions for specific regions.
A major limitation of AI-based systems is that they only systematically respond to inputs and outputs. They can’t qualify the results, so they can’t know for sure that all the information they provide is accurate. It can be a convenient and intuitive way to drill down on topics of interest by region, and various qualifiers can also be used to encourage you to provide more answers. in the first query.
Alternatively, you can ask to see the top questions on a specific subject with any modifiers you want to add, such as region, audience, etc.
then you can ask Chat GPT You can put these product questions into a table and add it to your Google/Answer the Public list.
Together, you can build a sizable collection of prompts and notes to guide your content strategy. At the very least, this gives you the means to build a connection with your audience in a variety of ways.
Can ChatGPT be used to create posts on these topics?
Yes you can, but again with some caution.
It mostly depends on the purpose of the post you are trying to create and the experience you want to give your site visitors.
Yes, a simple, cheap and time-saving strategy is to extend this by entering the questions you have listed as prompts for your ChatGPT posts, and optimizing these posts for specific key terms. Enter detailed instructions.
ChatGPT can do this and you can legally use it on your site. a little.
Google has clear rules for the use of AI-generated content and has created tools that can detect material created with ChatGPT. There are also various ongoing legal debates about the use of such tools, and essentially who owns the rights, all of which you should be aware of when using AI-derived material. This is an area under development.
Also, the copies you get from ChatGPT are based on inputs ChatGPT has access to. This is mostly a copy of many average websites from all over the internet.
So, if you don’t mind your website being read like everyone else and you’re okay with the potential risks (which are hard to measure at the moment), then you’re better off using this content for SEO purposes. It is recommended.
But as you can see in the example above, it’s pretty generic and pretty bland. I don’t think it’s meaningful or plentiful.
You can use them as a guide and reinvent them with your own editorial flair and input. You can see that many rewrites are necessary to the extent that it is possible.
That in itself can be a challenge, so there might be a way to use a hybrid approach to save time building an SEO foundation for your site.
Essentially, ChatGPT’s output is the median of all other data you read online, and will only get more bland and generic as more companies make ChatGPT summaries. Personally, I’d be better off with a newer approach, but you might be able to find an option to incorporate your current output with your own additions.
Another option – enter a piece of your own writing and then ask ChatGPT to follow the same style.
It’s not always great, and you always have to fact-check and edit each piece the app offers.
In my view, this is an additive tool that requires some experimentation and can offer different benefits. But there is no single solution for all your content needs.
Image AI
While blogging, both social posts and blog and website updates also require visuals to go along with the updates.
AI-based tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney can also be used for this purpose and both produce pretty good results based on specific prompts.
However, many of them look a little strange. It may take a few tries to get what you actually want to use, but you can also edit and refine it yourself to enhance your AI creation.
But it’s especially valuable in a brand marketing sense when:
DALL-E allows you to upload your own product images and then iterate by using AI tools to edit backgrounds and more. Weirdness on the edge.
The sample prompts used here are pretty average, and with more specific guidance (here some tips on how to best write AI prompts) you’ll get better results. After many tries, you may end up with a pretty good product image. However, please note that the free version of DALL-E uses a credit system and the amount you can use for free is limited (you can buy more credits if you want). ).
Legally, you can use AI-generated images for commercial purposes, Do not upload images of people without their consent, do not upload images that you do not have the rights to use, and do not create images of celebrities.
You must also provide a transparency note, such as “Main image created by DALL-E”, according to the respective terms of use.
Do these tools replace your entire stock image library? No, they usually require some customization and editing to get what you want, but for certain use cases you may want to use real photos (either your own or Photos from third-party sources) work better. But like ChatGPT, they can be useful tools in your creative arsenal as complementary elements to help improve your processes.
At the very least, it’s worth trying out these evolving systems and seeing what kind of results you get.
It costs nothing to try them, whether you use them or not. For now, at least.