The Potential of AI for Solopreneurs, Part 2: Social Media

Constantly coming up with new content for our social media accounts can be a time-consuming chore.

As part of my AI for solopreneurs series, this week I explored the use of AI tools to create social media posts, in the hope that it might ease the burden and save some much precious time.

While there are a lot that can create text for posts, I didn’t find many that were capable of generating text + images. In the end, I found two tools I deemed worthy of taking for a test drive:

Predis – free plan / $20 per month

Postello – free 7 day trial / US$39 per month

Here’s what I found:

Predis

Predis generates text + images for both Instagram and Facebook.

After creating an account, you’re asked some questions about your business/brand and audience, and can add in your brand colours (1 primary colour, 1 accent colour, and 1 text colour), one brand font (you can even upload a custom font!) and a logo for light backgrounds and a logo for dark backgrounds.

You’re then asked to choose 3 templates, from which the AI then generates 3 different posts. Here are the 3 it auto generated based on all the information I entered:

Note: I told the AI my audience was “heart-centered women solopreneurs” and my brand was about “intuitive, stress-free websites to attract dream clients”.

My first impressions:

1. the use of my brand colours was pretty darn awful! It was using lighter and darker shades of the 3 brand colours in a way that just didn’t work well at all.
2. The images it had chosen, while it did fit my business and audience, didn’t work well for my brand. It was obvious that the AI doesn’t really have any awareness of the colours within the stock images, choosing ones that don’t work at all with my brand colours.
3. The text was a little “clunky”, with odd capitalisations and words running together. It also wasn’t written for a solopreneur business, with use of “we” and “us” – and the text “team offemale (sic) solopreneurs” gave me a good giggle! 😀

I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the app, refining my inputs and trying different settings. Some of the posts it created were LOL funny, some were WTF? and others were interesting enough to spark some ideas.

The biggest problem though, was that often the headline didn’t match the content text at all!

In all, I generated about 30 posts. There were only about 3 I would use, with some minor editing. Another 5 gave me ideas for posts, but would require some pretty heavy editing in order to be useable.

The following post was the best of all those generated by the AI:

I did a bit of editing, and was easily able to post it to my Facebook page using Predis’s in built Facebook integration. Here’s the post on my page:

What do you think? Overall, I was happy with the way it turned out, but it took me longer to edit it than I would have liked! I think with some more time playing around with the inputs, I might be able to get more useful results which require less editing.

Postello

Postello creates posts for Facebook only. It’s UI is much simpler than Predis’s. You click the “Create Post” tab, choose a post type (informational, sales, entertaining, engaging, and viral), enter some keywords, select a few other settings (post style, emotionality etc), and click “generate”.

Here’s the first inputs I used and the resulting post it generated:

The text it generated was more polished then that from Predis, although the image were just straight stock photos and lacked some pizazz.

I tried a few more times, and this was the best result:

Overall, the results were OK, but nothing to write home (or post on social media!) about. Given Postello doesn’t have a free plan (only a free trial), and the paid plan is nearly twice that of Predis’s, I don’t really think its worth the cost.

The Verdict

I was rather underwhelmed by the AI generated posts, and I can’t see myself relying on these tools for my social media content creation. I think they have a way to go before they are a practical, viable solution for saving solopreneurs time with their social media.

However Predis, with its free plan, could be a handy tool to use to spark ideas when you’re drawing a blank on your next social media post. I do think the app shows promise, and will definitely be keeping my eye on how it develops.

What do you think of the AI generated posts? Do you prefer the Postello or Predis posts? And do you use any AI tools to help in creating your socials? Let me know in the comments below.