DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT

How Small Teams Can Use AI in Social Media Content Creation

Artificial intelligence has become a bit of a buzzword, as new tools promising enhanced capabilities for content creation and other tasks are released.

As the technology continues to evolve, there are already important ways health-system marketing and communication professionals can use AI to assist in outreach initiatives, such as promotional materials and blog posts.

As part of the SHSMD webinar series “Social Media Strategies in Health Care,” Franciscan Health’s Robbie Schneider and Erin Mullen presented a session focusing specifically on how AI can assist small teams in developing social media content.

What Is AI?

Schneider, the social media manager for the Indiana-based health system, shares a definition of AI, created by AI: “AI is a technology that automates processes and simulates human thinking, learning, decision making, creativity, and problem-solving.”

“The key word is it simulates,” she emphasizes. “It’s never going to be a full replacement for human intellect, human thought process, and human emotion. [It] should complement our content creation, not completely replace the human experience.”

Still in its relative infancy as a technology—it has been less than three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, its generative chatbot—AI has some limitations.

“There are a lot of problems still with AI,” Schneider says, describing the technology as “very much like a toddler or a teenager [in] that it doesn’t always listen and may go off and do whatever it wants. Make sure you don’t wholly rely on AI for its descriptions or any other content it generates.”

For example, she adds, users may give AI tools a prompt, and the tools “may or may not filter in all that information.” As a result, AI tools may not always interpret the information users provide correctly and, thus, may not always generation accurate responses.

AI tools have also taken and reproduced copyrighted materials illegally or unlawfully. For this reason, any materials created using AI tools should be edited by humans to ensure that content is “original to you.”

Finally, and this is significant for health-system marketing and communication professionals, AI often makes mistakes and struggles particularly with medical and scientific information.

According to Schneider, AI tools may incorporate data from “outdated medical studies” or use less-than-reliable sources—such as old articles and blog posts—for information.

AI’s Usefulness

However, even with these limitations, AI tools can offer value to health-system marketing and communications professionals seeking to create outreach initiatives with limited time and resources.

Some areas where health-system marketers may already be using AI tools include:

• automated customer journeys that use data to understand their patient bases and serve custom content;
• suggested phrases or copy updates in Grammarly or other writing tools;
• recommending times to send emails based on data, such as higher open rates or previous success; and
• editing or creating images and video.

Schneider highlights several what she calls “quick wins” for AI content creation, suggesting that these tools may be useful for:

• brainstorming potential questions on clinical or scientific topics;
• translating peer-reviewed journal articles into layman’s terms; and
•  writing meta descriptions and summaries.

“Those are all very easy things that you can implement today, no matter the size of your team, and that can help streamline your process or even just help us get past the blank page,” she says.

For the second example, she used AI to assist in the development of promotional materials for a journal article authored by cardiologists at Franciscan Health. The topic of the article was clinical outcomes for patients with acute myocardial infarction in underserved communities in Indiana.

To begin the process, she created the following prompt for AI: “Please summarize key findings on this article on health disparities in Indiana and heart conditions. Please write it for a nonmedical audience.”

The AI tool generated a brief summary of the article, translating the findings “into plain language” and a breakdown of the key points, she says.

“It was a great starting point that I was then able to turn over to our media relations team,” Schneider recalls.

When building AI prompts for tasks such as these, marketers need to consider the following:

• what you want to ask;
• what you want the content to look like;
• your audience;
• who you want AI to represent; and
• how you will use what AI gives you (article, customer relationship management email, presentation, etc.).

“You need to do some groundwork before you just dive in,” Schneider emphasizes. “You need to think about what you want to ask, what you want your content to look like, who your audience is, who you want your AI to represent. Am I representing a provider or the health care organization? Having those together before you write your prompt is going to make things go much quicker.”

Powerful Tools

Mullen, Franciscan Health’s content strategy manager, reviewed specific AI tools that may be helpful for health-system marketers, particularly those working as part of smaller teams, including:

• ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Jasper, which can be used to assist in the development in written content;
• Canva and Descript, which can be used to edit photos and videos;
• Riverside FM, an AI producer program that can edit audio and video content, removing pauses and other flaws;
• Magic audio, which can enhance audio;
• Adobe Premier, which can transcribe audio and video clips and edit the transcriptions (Schneider has used this and other similar tools such as rev.com to transcribe podcasts created by staff at Franciscan Health and convert them into blog posts); and
• Donna, an app that can be used to create music for use as background in videos. Schneider and Mullen used this tool to produce a “jingle” for Franciscan Health.

Simply put, these tools can save marketers time in performing these key tasks.

“There are a lot of great tools and technologies out there,” Mullen explains.