AI Social Media for Small Business Owners

AI social media tools are here, and they’re here to stay. 

Whatever type of business you run, there’s a huge benefit to maintaining an active, attractive presence on social media. That being said, business owners are a busy lot, and not everyone can find time in their day to update Facebook or Instagram.

Luckily, there’s an expanding range of AI social media tools designed specifically to help you run your accounts. And there are a number of additional AI marketing tools that can help speed up common tasks like image editing or video production.

Here’s how you can use AI social media tools to boost your business online.

What is AI, anyway? Is it coming to destroy us all?

AI comes in two flavors: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI).

AGI is a computer—or a network of computers—that thinks and learns like a human. It broadly mimics intelligence as we understand it, asking questions like, “What is… love?” and calling the scientist who invented it “Father.” AGI is still science fiction.

Turns out, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to the human mind machines currently can’t capture. A lot of very clever people are trying to change that—they’d love to have their own C3PO or Data to hang out with. But true AGI is a long way out.

ANI does exist. ANI is trained to do one thing well, like write responses in a chat window, or generate images. ANI is what we’re discussing when we talk about AI social media tools. 

The power of prompting

Most AI tools work from prompts. If you’ve ever experimented with ChatGPT, you’ve already written AI prompts. A prompt is a string of text you feed AI in order to get output. In the context of ChatGPT, each question or comment you enter is a prompt; each response is output.

AI tools for social media work in a similar way. In order to get text for a particular post, you enter a prompt. A prompt can be anything from a few words (“post about allergy season”) to many (“facebook post about three ways to stay healthy during allergy season without using medication and including a different emoji for each bullet point”).

Coming up with effective prompts for AI is an art unto itself, a field known as prompt engineering. 

Why use AI social media for your small business?

Long gone are the days when only giant tech companies and international brands maintained active social media presences. Small businesses of all types—from local Mom ‘n Pops to digital freelancers—use social media to attract new customers.

According to a Sprout Social survey, 9 out of 10 people who follow a particular brand on social media will make a purchase, and 86% will visit the brand’s location in person. A different study showed that 83% of Instagram users relied on the platform to help them discover new brands.

Your “brand” in this case may be a car detailing business, restaurant, or construction company. Or it could be you yourself—as a real estate agent, graphic designer, or freelance writer. Whatever the case may be, social media has the potential to bring you new business.

Besides that, maintaining an active presence on social media allows you to:

• Show the world you’re open for business. Online, an active social media account acts like a well-lit storefront. It shows people searching for your business, or businesses like it, that you’re active, engaged, and ready to serve them.

• Demonstrate the quality of your work. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a perfectly waxed sports car or your restaurant’s famous chicken biryani. Showing off what you do with photo and video content helps attract new customers and reinforce your image as a successful, dependable business.

• Make it easier for customers to find you. Active social media accounts not only give potential customers a way to find you on Facebook or Instagram. They improve your search rankings, as well—so, when someone searches for “X in my area,” you’re more likely to appear at the top of the list.

• Give happy customers a way to reach you. When you maintain an active social media account, happy customers have a place to leave nice comments out in the public, where everyone can see them.

• Give unhappy customers a way to reach you. Your social media accounts may serve as a place for unhappy customers to vent frustrations, too. But that’s a good thing: When customers come directly to you with their problems, you can tackle them immediately (the problems, not the customers) before they turn into negative Google reviews. You also have complete control over which comments are shown on your account, and who can post them.

The only drawback to running social media accounts for your business is that doing so can eat up time and energy which, for many small business owners, is already in short supply. That’s where AI social media comes in.

What AI can do for your business on social media

With the advent of the AI boom in the 2020s, a number of platforms have emerged that promise to do the heavy lifting when it comes to maintaining active social media accounts, as well as handling social-media-adjacent tasks that are typically major time sinks for business owners.

These are the tasks business owners and marketers are using AI tools to tackle:

• Text generation. With decent prompting, AI can generate text-based posts that match your brand’s voice and tone.

• Text edits and improvements. AI-assisted writing tools go well beyond simple spelling and grammar checks, helping human writers fine tune their work. 

• Image generation. Images created by AI aren’t limited to surrealism and viral deepfakes. New AI tools can create polished, professional graphics for use on social media.

• Image editing. You no longer need Photoshop skills to crop and or touch up photos, or to edit the background out of product shots. AI is ready to handle it.

• Video editing and creation. Video is the most popular medium on social platforms, and new AI tools help you create and edit video designed to appeal to your audience.

• Post scheduling and planning. Analytic tools powered by AI can tell you the best time to post in order to get the most views, and what types of content are most likely to appeal to your followers.

AI social media tools for small businesses

Broadly speaking, AI social media tools suitable for small businesses can be organized into four categories:

• AI social media post generators
• AI social media post editors
• AI image generators
• AI video generators

As AI develops further and companies find new ways to apply it to social media, you can expect more tools and services suited to small business owners to come to market. For now, though, here are the best tools for boosting your business’s social media output.

AI social media post generators

Whether you struggle with writer’s block or just don’t have time to sit down and put your thoughts on the page, AI post generators and other social media tools are ready to help.  

Buffer

Buffer was already one of the most popular social media scheduling and analytics tools, used by businesses both large and small, and when it introduced its AI post generator feature.

The AI assistant’s output, and the way it works—you enter a prompt, the AI spits out a post—is pretty standard. You can find comparable services included in AI copywriting tools like Jasper.

What makes it stand out is the fact that the tool is part of Buffer’s larger analytics and scheduling suite. If you’re busy running your business, and you don’t have time to stay on top of social media 24/7, Buffer lets you generate, edit, and schedule posts across multiple platforms using a single dashboard.

You “pay” for the AI post generator in Buffer using tokens. Your account receives a certain number of tokens to work with each month. Each time you generate a post, it costs you one token. 

Free Buffer accounts get 50 tokens. Paid accounts receive 150 tokens per social media channel (ie. 150 tokens for Facebook posts, 150 tokens for tweets, and so forth). 

If you’re ready to dive headfirst into creating and scheduling social media posts with help from AI, Buffer may be the right choice for you. The “Essentials” plan starts at $6 per month, and costs an additional $6 for each channel you add to your plan.

Durable

Not ready to start paying for a full social media marketing suite that generates and schedules posts in advance for you, but still need help writing your business’s next Facebook update? Take Durable’s AI social media post generator for a whirl.

You can access it from your Durable dashboard by going to Marketing>Promotions>New Promotion.

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The AI post generator is fairly straightforward. Select what type of post you’d like the AI to write for you—a Facebook post or a tweet—and then enter a prompt. There is no limit on the number of posts you can generate.

In the prompt area, you can specify the length of the post, its tone, and the specific topics you’d like covered.

Our post generator is an excellent way to start experimenting with AI prompting and creating AI assisted social media content without dishing out extra monthly payments for a suite of tools you may never use.

AI social media post editor

Representing your business on social media can be intimidating. It’s no longer only you you’re speaking for—it’s your livelihood. Luckily, when AI takes on the editor’s role, you can rest assured your grammar, spelling, and tone of voice are immaculate. Enter Grammarly.

Grammarly

You may already have heard of Grammarly, the AI writing assistant that promises to co-author everything from work emails to school papers, ensuring every i is dotted and every t crossed.

What you might not know is that Grammarly can be a powerful tool for writing social media posts. The free basic plan checks your spelling and grammar for you, and—with help from AI—may do a better job than your word processing software.

Once you sign up for a paid plan, however, you unlock the ability to have Grammarly rewrite entire sentences for you. This can be a huge help if, beyond spelling and grammar, you’re worried about factors like word choice, voice and tone, and conciseness.

Keep in mind, however, that Grammarly does not feature any tools specifically meant to format your posts for social media. You’ll have to write your posts in Grammarly’s text editor, and then copy and paste them into whatever app you’re using to make or schedule posts.

Grammarly is free to try, and the paid version starts at $12 per month.

AI video generator

More than 54% of marketers say video is the most valuable asset on social media. With the rise of TikTok and Instagram’s Reels feature, it’s no wonder. Luckily, you don’t need to be an expert cinematographer to create great video content. AI can do it for you.

Steve.ai

One of the fastest, most straightforward ways to create video content that catches your followers’ attention is by using text and animation. There’s no need for a high quality camera, or lighting, or one of those folding chairs directors sit in. With Steve.ai, you can easily adapt written content to video, spicing it up either with stock imagery or your own photos.

You don’t need experience with video editing software to get up and running with Steve.ai. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, and there are a lot of different templates and styles to choose from. 

The platform can generate text for your videos, but its real power is in the way it lets you repurpose content for different platforms. For instance, you could take a multi-photo post from Instagram and, by uploading the caption text and photos to Steve.ai, create a video for sharing on Facebook and YouTube.

Steve.ai is free to try, with professional packages starting at $15 per month.

AI social media image generators

For small businesses owners more concerned with paying the rent than hiring photographers and illustrators, AI image generators are a boon. With a little tweaking, you can get graphics to accompany your social media posts at a fraction of what it would cost to hire a freelancer.

Playground AI

For all around image generation, Playground AI is a solid choice. It’s simple to use, and offers lots of different image styles and configurations. You can choose output styles ranging from near-photorealistic to vintage cartoon.

It may take some time experimenting with prompts and tweaking different settings until you get results you’re happy with. Luckily, Playground AI offers a free version, with limits on image size and quality. Paid versions start at $15 per month.

Canva

Canva is well-established as a cloud-based graphics suite, with many features designed specifically with small business owners in mind. It’s a handy tool for creating social media graphics, especially if you don’t have experience with software like Photoshop. 

Canva recently released 10 new features, a few of which use AI. The most useful ones for social media marketing are:

• Magic Eraser and Magic Edit, which can help clean up product photos
• Magic Design, which can create presentations based on your prompts
• Text to Image, which is Canva’s in-app AI image generator

If you’re all thumbs when it comes to photo editing, or you’d like to experiment with building a brand identity for social media, Canva is a great place to start. It’s free to try, and Pro plans start at $12.99 per month.

Google Autodraw

Google’s free Autodraw tool is simple, intuitive, and useful for anyone who wants to communicate visually but lacks an artistic touch. Sketch something in Autodraw, and AI will interpret what you’re drawing, then provide a more polished, professional substitute. 

If you need to create how-to’s or explainers for your products, put together a pitch deck or presentation, or even create a rudimentary comic or slideshow, Autodraw is indispensable. The icons it substitutes for user input are modern, attractive, and cover a huge number of concepts and situations. And even if you have a shaky hand when it comes to illustration, the AI does a good job guessing what you’re getting at.

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Social media is just one option when it comes to marketing your new venture. Learn more with our guide to Easy Marketing Ideas for Your New Business.