Authenticity is the key to truly connecting with your audience on social media. A great example of this is the success of popular influencers, who have gained fame from being themselves online. However, we’ve also seen the downfall of influencers who were caught not being authentic. Brands should also be practicing this on their social media, in order to gain their audience’s trust. Now, with the increasing popularity of AI, being authentic, honest, and transparent is more important than ever.

Sound Like a Human

In Likeable Social Media, Dave Kerpen discusses the many reasons why it’s important to be authentic on social media. We use social media to interact with other human beings, therefore it’s important for your brand to also seem like a human in the way that you post. In my experience using social media, it’s quite jarring to scroll through my timeline and come across something that’s clearly not authentic. Kerpen says that “you have to be an authentic human being in your interactions. Anything less and your consumers might consider your attempt at conversation nothing more than a marketing ploy…If you are robotic or scripted in your social media interactions, despite the best of intentions, you will turn off customers and prospects.”

AI

The use of AI has significantly increased recently. It’s becoming more and more integrated into social media everyday. AI offers a lot of great tools for social media, but brands need to be careful. Kerpen says that “impersonal devices create a division between your service or product and your customer because there is a loss of valuable human interaction.” I would definitely consider AI an impersonal device. If you’re going to utilize AI, being transparent about this is crucial. Kerpen gives an example of a Senator who messaged him on Facebook asking for donations. After a few messages, it was clear to Kerpen that he wasn’t actually messaging the Senator. Once he asked, he eventually confirmed that he was actually speaking to the Senator’s assistant. Although it wasn’t AI, he still knew something was off and the tactic for getting a donation didn’t even work. If we can tell when we’re messaging someone’s assistant, we can definitely tell when something is AI.

Be an Improv Show, Not a Musical

Kerpen makes a great analogy where he says that your brand’s social media should be an improv show, and not a musical. He means that it doesn’t need to be so heavily engineered, but rather just honest and good. We might think using AI will make us sound better, but we’re really just putting on a performance and it’s obvious. Social media users are beginning to point out in memes and comment sections when something “sounds like ChatGPT”. Platforms are even starting to have features that tell the audience if something contains AI. This doesn’t mean using AI should be completely off limits, but be sure to use it more for inspiration and less as something you copy and paste directly into your caption or DMs to customers.