While AI has transformed how creators and brands produce content, it is essential to use it effectively to achieve the desired results. If you use weak prompts, you will get weak, generic results that may not achieve the desired outcome. On the other hand, a well-thought-out prompt will provide a valuable response that fits into the workflow.

Since AI responses are generated in a specific way, there is a need for strong prompts if you need workable responses that meet your needs, rather than generic fluff. In this guide, we guide you on how to prompt AI tools to get great responses when using AI for social media content.

Why Prompting Matters in Generative AI?

The way you prompt in generative AI will determine whether you get the relevant and actionable outputs. This is important because the chatbots are designed to follow instructions. If you use vague instructions, you will get vague results. You want to ensure that AI-generated results match your brand’s tone.

By improving your prompts in generative AI, you can enjoy various benefits such as:

• Higher level of relevance and accuracy.
• Ability to make decisions faster.
• Better level of personalization and customization.
• More consistency.
• More unique results and creativity.
• Higher ROI.

Key Checklist When Creating Prompts

For the best results with generative AI, you need to pay attention to:

AI-Focused Brand Voice and Tone

It’s important to have a brand style guide that outlines your logo specs, color palette, brand tone, and voice. Sharing this brand style guide with other team members or departments is easy. However, when using generative AI, conveying the context and nuances of the brand voice can prove challenging.

For instance, when you tell another human to use a friendly and approachable tone, they can understand to use shorter sentences, humor, contractions, and more. However, when you tell that to an AI tool, it will refer to its training, which can be bland, overly formal, etc. That’s why you need to have an AI-focused brand voice that is more explicit, more specific, and filled with examples.

Instead of using abstract terms to describe your brand voice, the AI-focused brand voice should show the AI how the brand voice looks and what it excludes. You can do that by creating a tone and voice snapshot that includes all your brand guidelines for social media marketing, condensed into 2 to 3 pages of the most essential elements. You can then use this as your AI guidelines to enable you to produce things such as LinkedIn updates, emails, and blog posts. 

You need to add the following to your AI-specific brand guidelines:

Key Voice Attributes

Instead of listing adjectives, you need to define the meaning of different attributes for your brand voice. This is especially true as the AI tools perform better when you are more specific. Instead of requesting a conversational tone, explain to the tool what the tone looks like. For instance, you can tell the tool to write like someone explaining something to a friend in a coffee meeting, rather than a board meeting.

Brand Personality

You want to ask yourself the kind of person your brand would be if it were a real person. When you provide a persona for the tool, you make it more consistent in its word choice, formality, and humor. For instance, you can have an informal tone filled with slang in all your social media channels. 

Provide Comparison

Concrete comparisons help AI to learn a lot, and this is where you train the tool between on-brand and off-brand writing. When doing that, you need to cover:

• Choice of words. You can list the specific words you want the AI tools to swap. For instance, tell the tool to use “complicated” instead of “complex,” or “can” instead of “able to”. You can also define the words you don't want used, such as synergy, leverage, best-in-class, or utilize.
• Sentence structure. You can create a comparison between a good version and a bad one. For example, “Here are three simple steps to automate this” instead of “The process automation can be completed in three simple steps.”
• Tone for each context. When you are explaining a complex concept, your brand can be a bit different from how you address your customers’ pain points. 

Length and Format of Your Sentence

There are certain details that can be understood by humans, but AI tools will struggle to. For instance, when you tell an AI tool to use more contractions and parentheses instead of formal language, you can make the output match your brand guidelines. 

Therefore, make sure you specify the following for the tool:

• Average sentence length and whether to use short sentences.
• Punctuation preferences.
• Preferred formatting, such as emphasizing using bold instead of italic, or using title case in headers instead of sentence case.
• Guidelines on the use of emojis and where (for instance, in social media posts but not in blog posts).

Point of View of Themes

There are various recurring themes for brands, such as their core beliefs and perspectives, showing in their content. When you document these themes, you can help the AI tools take a strong stance. For instance, a brand like Nike focuses more on determination, while Google focuses on innovation.

Preferred Content Structure

You need to let the AI tool understand how you prefer your content organized. This can be particularly important for emails, blog posts, and landing pages, where readability is affected by structure. 

Some of the tips for providing guidelines for the content structure are:

• A hook in the beginning. This can include a surprising statistic, bold statement, or question.
• Use at least one example for each major section
• Use the first 100 words to get to the point.
• Leverage subheadings for every 200 to 300 words.
• Conclude with a clear and actionable takeaway and not a generic one, such as wrapping up or in conclusion.

Language Guidelines

When creating AI brand guidelines, you want to delve deeper into specifics such as the kind of lingo used, general industry jargon, and general policy. You can categorize your jargon into three categories.

• Jargon used freely. Your audience is already familiar with these.
• Jargon we avoid completely, and the reason for that.
• Jargon that requires explaining on the first mention.

Do’s and Don’t’s

You need to have AI brand guidelines for your non-negotiable. The good thing is that AI is effective in keeping boundaries. For instance:

• Never begin your sentence with Well or So.
• Avoid using exclamation marks in blog posts, but it’s fine to use them on social media.
• Avoid using phrases such as "be able to" in an increasingly digital landscape.
• Avoid using generic inspirational quotes,

You need to ensure that the list is unique to the brand. The goal should be to avoid the annoying phrases commonly used by AI.

Full Comparison Examples

You can now create 2 or 3 paragraphs featuring different styles and use labels such as “our brand voice.” You can also label the others as too formal or sloppy, too casual or sloppy, or too AI-sounding. This will provide the AI tool with a clear point of reference. It's like explaining to someone what your business looks like versus showing them.

Audience Context

You need the AI tool to understand who you are writing for and remain specific. For instance, instead of saying the small business owners, you can say something like, “Owners of massage parlors with a staff of 5 to 15, who are also tired of marketing jargon and need some practical advice they can act on instead of an abstract strategy.”

Add what your audience already understands so that the AI doesn’t keep over-explaining, and include what they already need from the content, such as how-to guides, a big-picture strategy, and recommendations for specific tools instead of a general framework, and more.

How to Use the AI Brand Guidelines

Creating these guidelines is just the first step. You will now need to use them in the following steps:

Upload the Guidelines and Reference Them

The major AI tools allow users to upload certain documents for their context. You can then tell the tools to use it in words such as “Here is our brand tone and guidelines. Go through it and create an email campaign on those topics.”

Create a Library with the Top Examples

In addition to your style guidelines, you need to train the AI tool using the top examples of the best content. Curate a small library consisting of 10 to 15 pieces showcasing your best brand voice in email, blog posts, landing pages, and social media captions.

Front Laid the Text

Before generating content, ensure you provide the AI tool with relevant audience background, informational articles, and articles from competitors you want to set yourself apart from. When you become more proprietary and specific, you will gain more context for differentiation.

In Conclusion

AI tools can be really useful in producing some strong content without the need for rewriting and heavy editing. However, they can only do that when you give them the context. If you want the AI content you generate to sound like that of your brand, you should be very specific. Use the above tools to do that, and you can read our guide on AI tools to enhance LinkedIn content creation.