By Bart Eshwar
Generative AI has taken the world by storm. It’s gone viral on social media and attracted billions of dollars in investment, with companies like Google and Microsoft scrambling to integrate these technologies into their products. While scrappy startups and big tech firms will battle it out over the next few years for dominance in the space, generative AI has caused an even bigger disruption in the content creation space for small businesses.
Up until a few years ago, small businesses were paying hefty retainers to content agencies to market their services—and the investment had been well worth it. Most small businesses relied on agencies to create content tailored for different social media platforms and help build an audience for their products and services.
Generative AI has now enabled companies to create their own content—faster and cheaper—through an arsenal of nearly-free content creation tools, essentially allowing every small business to have its own private content agency. AI programs and tools can now largely replicate much of what professional agencies do, and businesses can save tremendous money and be fully in control of their own messaging.
How to use generative AI for content creation
1. Text content
Text forms the basis of most content created for social media, an area where generative AI excels particularly well. Programs like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can craft high-quality text in seconds based on the prompts entered by the user. Types of content include:
Blog posts: To create a blog post, you can either prompt programs like ChatGPT or Bard to write an entire post, or use them to create outlines for your posts and then fill in the details yourself. The AI will create readable, grammatically correct, and engaging content for your audience. The right prompts will also optimize the post for SEO.
But it’s essential to be smart while using generative AI—having AI write posts doesn’t remove human intervention altogether. You may still need to refine the posts, double-check the content, and add any brand-appropriate personalization. AI, however, can do a lot of the heavy lifting for your blog, and enable a one-person team to build and execute a whole website’s blogging strategy.
Email marketing: Many small businesses have email lists of current and potential customers, but don’t engage with them regularly. Generative AI tools can help draft and send regular emails. These emails can even be personalized for specific customers based on the information customers have shared with you.
Tweets and Instagram captions: Generative AI can generate very convincing tweets and even add appropriate hashtags to your X (formerly known as Twitter) posts. You might need to work on your prompts so that your tweets can convey your business’ tone, but AI can help you save countless hours. It also can create Instagram captions and hashtags.
2. Images
While text is still important for search engines, image posts are popular on social networks like Facebook and Instagram, and generative AI can help create images for free in seconds. Programs like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney allow you to create images based on a single text prompt; you can then edit those images with online image editing software, like Canva, and personalize it for your business. A few image editing programs have integrated generative AI within their workflows, such as the generative fill function in Adobe Photoshop.
Note: using generative AI for image generation isn’t always exact, and it may take several tries to come up with the results you want.
3. Video
Video generation: While using AI for video generation is still in its early days, it can still help augment your content creation efforts. Unlike text and image tools, which have some great free alternatives, most video generation tools cost money. However, tools like Runway ML and D-ID will generate high-quality videos through just text prompts, and offer free and low-cost options.
Video subtitles: Subtitles are particularly important for social media videos. A Verizon Media and Publicis Media study found that 80% of people are more likely to watch an entire video if it has subtitles. Plus many users browse social networks with their phones on mute. Generative AI can come in very handy for this, and there are services that can automatically create subtitles for your videos.
FAQs about using generative AI to create content
How can you use AI in content creation?
AI can be used in every aspect of content creation including generating articles, writing social media posts, SEO, keyword research, creating images, and even creating videos.
Which AI creates visual content?
Popular AI tools that create visual content are Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-E for image content, and Runway and D-ID for video content.
Which AI is best for content creation?
OpenAI's GPT-4 is currently the best model for text-based AI content creation and is widely thought to be superior to all competitors, while Stable Diffusion is the most popular AI tool for image creation, largely because it's effective, free, and open-source.
About the Author
Post by: Bart Eshwar
Bart Eshwar is the content head for www.officechai.com, a website dedicated to covering stories on startups, technology, and careers. He holds degrees in computer science and economics, and has been creating content and leading content-creation teams for over a decade.
Company: OfficeChai
Website: www.officechai.com
Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.
