How to Create Engaging Social Media Content with AI

Full video transcript

What’s going on, y’all, Darby here. Zechariah here, how’s it going, everyone? Great to see you guys today, and thank you so much for tuning in with us. If you are here live, today we are super pumped to be bringing you a brand new recipe that we’ve been developing over the past few weeks to help really streamline and accelerate social media content creation, centered around engagement.

Before we dive into that, if this is your first time checking out us or what we’re doing at The AI Author, or first time checking out Jasper as a tool, you can go and get a free trial of Jasper, get 10,000 free words to give what we’re doing right here a spin, and we’ll be sharing the recipe with you as well so you can try this with your own brand, with your own voice. Make sure that you just subscribe to us on YouTube; this is where we post all of our live streams and all of our video trainings for free on our YouTube channel, so go ahead and click subscribe and make sure that notification button is clicked as well so you get notified whenever a new video comes up.

We got some people tuning in with us live here. If you are tuning in with us live, let us know where you’re tuning in from, and we’re going to kind of dive into things as well. We’d love to kind of take some ideas from the crowd in terms of what to create some content around; getting suggestions from the audience is my favorite thing, and then just expanding on that with Jasper really shows the tool, and obviously it speaks to how good you are with Jasper too, Darby, but I love that.

Guys, I know we’re still recovering from the great Thanos thumb snap right there, Jarvis to Jasper, so I went ahead and made this hat as a public service announcement. As we’re talking about these trainings, let’s keep it in our lingo. Top priority is creating these recipes for you guys in this high-level training so that you guys can use Jasper to its fullest potential.

We’ve got people tuning in from India on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook, we’re on LinkedIn, we are on YouTube, we’re actually streaming live on Twitch and Twitter as well right now, just trying to get out there. Wherever you follow us on social media, we’ll try to be there with you, either weekly or bi-weekly, with these type of trainings.

Let’s go ahead and dive right into what we’re going to be talking about today. A few years ago, maybe a little over a year ago, for one of my projects, Side Hustle (it’s a party game for entrepreneurs), when I was browsing the internet one day looking at what other cool products might have some synergy with our board game, I came across a game from a company called White Label Comedy. Founder Adam Hunt used to be a comic writer, filling in scripts for sitcoms and actually making them funny. He ended up consulting and developing a service to help brands actually create content that was engaging and entertaining, so their brand wasn’t boring online, working with a lot of different brands as he started his White Label Comedy business.

One of the products that came from that was this tool, and I made sure to get Adam’s permission to share this with you and preface what we’re going to be doing with it, called Brands Against Mundanity. I’m going to share my screen because it’s a digital PDF that they built, and I bought it and loved it right away. It’s designed, this is pre-Jarvis, pre-Jasper, pre-Conversion.ai days, to be worked on with teams so you could have a brainstorming session with your team and create posts that engage, entertain, and sell.

They put together this really valuable PDF that explains what they are: essentially a hive mind of TV’s best comedy writers who came up with this. I thought it was always an awesome prompt and referenced it time and again. Then I thought, I don’t have a big team of marketers to bounce ideas off with, and I’d still get stuck in my own head going through these prompts. What if I made a recipe out of it with Jasper, and what if I could play this game with Jasper to help me come up with content?

Jasper’s not going to be the joke master here; there’s still context I wouldn’t want to replace an actual comic or a professional writer with completely. But what I realized was these prompts are all about engagement and all about frameworks, and that’s exactly how Jasper operates: patterns and frameworks that it builds on top of. I spent probably three or four hours this past weekend taking everything from inside this post and molding it into a recipe, and that’s what I wanted to show you today, because it’s allowed me, just in the last week, to generate easily a month or two’s worth of Twitter posts that I could schedule out, plus it’s helped prompt me on LinkedIn posts, and content that isn’t always selling, content that engages the audience of The AI Author and my personal brand in general.

If you want to go download it right now into your own Jasper account and work along with us, I have a redirect link, theaiauthor.com/bam (“brands against mundanity”). If you’re interested, they have a lot of other products they’ve developed since I got this over a year ago, meme generators and basically endless ways to generate content, and you can make these your own recipes too. Adam’s a great guy with a killer team doing cool stuff. Now let’s experiment with what it looks like to create some content live and take the stress off making all these prompts, plugging it right into this recipe.

If you guys have an idea for your own brand, a business, or something funny, drop it in the chat. What’s the concept, topic, or idea? We can also make one up. Somebody suggested “donut shop profits,” so we’re going with that. I use a tool called Voice In, a lot of you will have voice dictation built into your computer, Mac or PC, so I’m just going to speak what I’m saying here.

Let’s start filling out the content brief before we dive into the recipe. This is social media content for a brand that helps donut shops increase their profits by increasing their sales in person and online. The brand, Donut Shop Profits, helps donut shops from all around the world boost their sales and increase their customer satisfaction and lifetime value. The target audience is people that shop at these donut shops, both donut shop owners and people who follow donut shops online.

The content will be posted onto the brand’s social media accounts and is designed to engage with their audience online while entertaining and selling at the same time. About 540 characters out of 600, safe to keep things there. For tone of voice, we picked funny and witty, like Dunkin’ Donuts. Keywords left out for now.

So now we’ve filled out the content brief for the donut shop brand, and now we’re tasked with generating a ton of content to populate Twitter, Instagram captions, and everything in between. What I’ve included here are all the examples from that Brands Against Mundanity PDF, real brands that have used this. First engagement driver, from Cadbury: “How many advent calendars is it acceptable for a grown man to buy himself, asking for a friend?” You’ll see the pattern below: how many X is acceptable for Y to buy themselves, asking for a friend. X is a product you only need to buy in small quantities, Y is a description of someone who should really know better. Now we’ve got the command that tells Jasper to follow this pattern and provide social media content.

My favorite command in the world is Ctrl+Shift+Enter, which keeps the command in place so I don’t have to rewrite it every time, letting me run it repeatedly to generate content rapidly. First one: “How many donuts is it acceptable for a healthy person to buy themselves, asking for a friend?” “How many jelly beans is acceptable for a giant to buy themselves, asking for a friend?” “How many jelly beans is acceptable for a diabetic to buy themselves, asking for a friend?” We’re getting the prompts out there, and honestly this is enough to get the creative juices flowing. Don’t edit while you’re creating the content; get it out, then trim it up later. Maybe generate three to five per prompt and move to the next one.

If you want to download the recipe right now, if you don’t have a Jasper account you can sign up for a free trial at theaiauthor.com/jasper, and the recipe itself is at theaiauthor.com/bam.

Next: “Reply with your favorite day of the year and why. It’s December 25th.” A caveat: some patterns Jasper doesn’t quite get as well as others, so it’s still open for your direction as the person behind it; you don’t even need AI for all of these. “Reply with your favorite donut and why it’s the best” gets a synonym version: “Reply with your favorite type of donut and why it’s an apple fritter” or “why it’s Krispy Kreme.” Sometimes you get caught in loops where it says kind of the same thing; don’t get hung up on only relying on AI. “Reply with your favorite [donut brand], what’s your favorite type of donut and why it’s an apple fritter.”

Example three, Christmas Depot: “What’s your favorite time of year? Christmas, the festive season, late December.” Same what’s-your-favorite-X-A-B-or-C pattern with synonyms. If you’re wanting to do a Twitter poll or a LinkedIn poll, that might be a good way to engage your LinkedIn audience.

Quick shout-out here to Mark, whose first book, written using AI, following the recipes and process from Publish with Jarvis, is now done; Mark is a published author using his book to connect with more people in the education space. Congratulations, Mark. To recap: we’re creating social media content for a made-up marketing company called Donut Shop Profits that helps donut shop owners. If you’re like Mark, an education consultant helping parents get their teens on track for college, you’d fill this out and focus around your target audience the same way.

Engagement number four: “What’s your favorite craft beer, A, B, C, or D?” where D is the only option not among the brand’s actual products. This is where Jasper doesn’t quite click every time; it just prompts with letters rather than filling in actual flavor names sometimes. This is roughly the sixth or seventh time running through this recipe.

Number five: “Did you know Christmas pudding was originally a soup made with raisins and wine? No, I didn’t believe my mom’s excuse either.” This can work as an engaging hook for a LinkedIn post, a “did you know” story format. Applied to the brand: “Did you know that donut shops can actually increase their profits by 50% by implementing an online sales strategy, and with tools like ours it’s easier than ever to get started”; this is making up advertising content on the fly using the recipe for creative inspiration, not just following it literally. Another: “Did you know that donut shops can make more money when they offer a loyalty program? No, I don’t believe my favorite donut shop owner when he said he was going to start a loyalty program, but it’s true, a recent study found…”

Next pattern: “Who’s your favorite member of [group], favorite category, relevant, genuine, silly options.” Using Ctrl+Shift+Enter again to keep the command up. The A-B-C-D style prompts (favorite donut, favorite donut shop, favorite type of donut) don’t always pick up the comedic pattern well, but they get you a lot closer to writing content around your different product types, similar to a survey question, which tends to get good engagement on LinkedIn.

Anagram pattern: it’s not always literally correct as an anagram, but the idea is a positive phrase associated with the brand, like “Donut Shop Profits is an anagram of Boost Sales” or “Profits is an anagram of Satisfaction,” a playful, not-literal wordplay device.

Polls pattern: “What’s the best Christmas movie? I’m going with It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m wrong.” The pattern here is that there’s no real choice, it’s a setup: “What’s the best type of donut, cake, yeast, or filled? [Your choice]. I’m wrong.” You interject as the brand owner what the “obvious” choice is.

“On this day in 1899 the trampoline was invented, followed the day after by the invention of the stretcher” pattern becomes, for example, “1938 the first donut was invented, followed the day after by the invention of sprinkles, followed the day after by the invention of the elastic waistband.” The human adds the punchline detail that makes it land.

The team notes throughout that Jasper is not a professional comic, and it won’t get all the nuance; it gets content about 80% of the way there, and the human adds the remaining 20% by modifying and injecting the right specific detail.

Other patterns demonstrated: “Spare a thought for [group]” becomes “Spare a thought for donut shop workers who have to smell donuts and can’t eat them, having to work in an oven all day.” “What’s your favorite [X]? Mine is [wrong answer], which is [actually a different category], so obviously wrong” becomes a pattern-interrupt joke. “Missing [thing]” becomes “Missing a freshly made donut? Recreate the experience by buying a dozen from out of town and eating them all at once.”

There are 52 total prompts in the recipe, broken into sections. The engagement drivers section wraps with patterns like “crossing X with Y” (donuts with coffee, donuts with tacos), calling out a competitor (“Hey [competitor], fancy a [product] tonight?”), and “tag a friend who just wouldn’t appreciate [X]” (a donut with no hole).

Moving into the relatable jokes section: “Every family has one crazy holiday tradition” style prompts, testing the AI on an intentionally odd prompt about cats produces “Don’t knock cats until you’ve tried it, some people might say donuts are the new cats, I like to think donuts are way better; after all, donuts are round and fluffy.” “Nothing’s more important than family, clearly they haven’t heard about [brand-relevant thing]” becomes a template for relatability. “Families are like [product category], you only really notice them when [downside]” becomes “Families are like donuts, they’re always delicious and there’s never too many,” reworked into “great with just one or two, but twelve out of ten” for family gatherings. “Friends don’t let friends [X]” becomes “Friends don’t let friends eat terrible [unhealthy food],” fitting a healthy-donut-niche angle.

There’s also a moment where, after deleting part of a generated command and using Ctrl+J to have Jasper continue, the AI prompted itself with structure: start with a rhetorical question the target audience is thinking about, add a light-hearted or funny observation, then get straight to the point about what the audience needs to know, closing with a call to action. The hosts note that a strong call to action usually means offering something for free (a free book, a free class) rather than a generic “visit our website.”

The final section covers product pitches, sales-oriented content in the same playful tone. Example from McDonald’s: “It’s always ‘when is the McRib coming back’ and never ‘how are you’ to the person who runs the McDonald’s Twitter account,” a template about an old product audience members get excited about returning. From KFC: “Healthy relationships are about give and take, for example you give us $4.99 and you can take a bucket of chicken,” reworked as “Give us a dozen donuts and you can take $12.99,” a lightly humorous sales pitch. A job-posting-style pattern (“Anyone who thinks there’s no such thing as a dream job clearly hasn’t met the person who gets to proofread Grammarly’s site”) becomes “hasn’t met the donut taste tester,” usable for hiring content. An investment-framing pattern (“Think of this as an investment”) becomes “the donut shop will make a great place for people to gather and socialize.” A “last year at my local [business], the profits were so [bad] the owner is thinking of closing up shop” pattern is noted as a good scary-story style hook. A “don’t forget your five a day” pattern (from Starbucks: espresso, cappuccino, mocha, hot chocolate) plugs in a brand’s most popular products (donuts, coffee, cakes, cookies, pies).

Any questions about how to use Jasper effectively for your brand can be dropped in the comments. Connect with The AI Author on all socials, or with Darby directly (Darby A Rollins) and Zechariah (Z is for Zechariah). To get access to this recipe, go to theaiauthor.com/bam, download it directly into your Jasper account. You do need a Jasper account with Boss Mode activated to run these recipes; if you don’t have one, get 10,000 free words at theaiauthor.com to get started. Next week’s live training will cover creating a 100-150 page business book designed to generate leads for your business, a roughly 90-minute workshop building the whole process live, at theaiauthor.com/training.