Ideation – How to Find Ideas for Social Media Posts

Transcript

My name is Andrew Bolis and in this lesson I’ll show you how to use AI to come up with ideas for your social media posts. 

More about me: I’m a business growth consultant and an AI expert. I’ve driven 190 million in revenue for B2B companies over my career. Currently, I help companies leverage LinkedIn and AI tools to attract new customers in a cost effective way. 

Maintaining your online presence and even building a personal brand can be a challenge. It’s extremely time consuming. It requires multiple skills like writing, storytelling, and design. And we often run out of ideas for things to post about. Using a tool like ChatGPT can help you generate content, stay up to date with the latest trends, and even generate ideas for your social media posts. 

In this lesson, I’ll cover five steps to writing a ChatGPT prompt that helps you get ideas for your social media posts. It’s gonna include providing context, specifying your target audience, setting a goal, providing additional details and constraints and testing and iterating. 

So number 1 is providing ChatGPT with context. This is where you let ChatGPT know who you are, what company you work for, and any other relevant details about your product and service. 

Number 2 is where you define your target audience and that’s where you let ChatGPT know who you’re writing for, what roles or industries you’re targeting and even things like their interests and pain points. 

Number 3 is where you specify a goal. So in this case it could be attracting more followers on social media, growing your personal brand, positioning yourself as an expert in a specific field like cybersecurity or maximizing engagement among a group of decision makers like CTOs. 

Number 4 is including specifics and constraints. In this case we’ll tell ChatGPT what channel you’re posting on any themes or trends that you want to cover. 

And number 5 is testing and adjusting. And this is where you try out your prompt, make adjustments as needed until you have an output that you’re satisfied with. 

This is a prompt I put together for a salesperson at HubSpot looking for ideas for social media posts. And, you can pause this and read the prompt itself. I think it will help you understand, but you can, you’ll notice right away that it covers all the parts. So it has context, it has an audience, it sets a goal and includes additional details and constraints. 

And then at the end the task is to give me 10 topic ideas for LinkedIn posts that will help me achieve my goal and engage my target audience. Ensure the ideas, incorporate trending topics and current themes. So for prompting and ChatGPT, there’s two ways to do it. You can do one long prompt where you give ChatGPT all the details at once and the request and then you get the output, or you could do it as a chain of prompts where you give ChatGPT a series of requests until you get the output or the result you’re looking for. 

Now we’re gonna try this out. So I’ve already gone ahead and ran the big prompt in ChatGPT. I do have browser plugins enabled for this. Uh, the one I’m using is called BrowserOP, but any browser plugin you use like web browser plugin will work. The reason we need a plugin for this is because we’re saying to include trending topics and current themes. And so ChatGPT needs to actually go out to the web to grab some of those. So having run this prompt already, you can see the output. It came back with 10 ideas. Some of these ideas might be good, some of them might not be so good. 

The great thing about this is that you can just ask ChatGPT to give you 10 more ideas and submit this and you’ll get 10 more ideas and you can just keep asking it for more ideas. At this point, you can get an unlimited number of ideas until you end up with a few that you really like. So now I’m gonna also show you how to do this as a chain of prompts. 

Now I broke up those big prompts into four mini prompts and I just provided them one at a time. So first I told ChatGPT, who I am where I work. I include this last part, confirm you understand this to avoid ChatGPT giving me random output, but you can leave this part out. And then the second prompt is telling ChatGPT my goal, which is to position myself as a thought leader. And then I want to share practical tips and valuable insights that engage my target audience. Again, ask ChatGPT to confirm it understands this to avoid it, just giving random output or advice at this point cause I still haven’t given it my task.

And then the third prompt, I give it more details and constraints. So I give it my tone of voice. I told it that I’m specifically focusing on LinkedIn ideas and I want it to be original, interesting, practical and insightful. Again, it said, confirm you understand this just to avoid it giving me random output. And you see here, confirmed it, understood this. And now I just give it the final task, which is: give me 10 topic ideas for LinkedIn posts that will help me achieve my goal and engage my target audience. Ensure that the ideas incorporate trends, topics, and current themes. 

Here it did use a web browsing plugin called Vox Script. Again, it uses this to get the latest trends and current themes, but even if you don’t have plugins enabled, this prompt will still work. And it did give me ideas and I can see that some of them are incorporating themes like this AI and marketing automation, one cause that’s a topic that leaders have really only been thinking about in the last six to 12 months. 

And some of these ideas too are different from the one we got from the other prompts. You see, like this ethics one, I didn’t see it in the other prompt. And like the other prompt, if you want more ideas, you just say, give me 10 more ideas. And you submit this and ChatGPT will come back with 10 more.