Writing Facebook Posts with ChatGPT: Best Practices

When I see a Facebook post written with ChatGPT (or any AI tool, for that matter), I have a few thoughts:

• This business thinks that they don’t have the budget for a copywriter.
• They haven’t spent any time at all thinking about their target audience.
• They don’t care about their brand.

That might be harsh, but it’s my kneejerk reaction; if you’re willing to copy-and-paste autogenerated text onto your company’s social media page and hit “post,” you must not have a great concept of why social media is important. 

But to be fair, I can only make those judgments if I know that a post is AI. If someone has a genuinely unique thought and uses ChatGPT to finish that thought, I wouldn’t have the same reaction.

Unfortunately, AI-generated status updates are incredibly easy to spot. They use excessive emojis and hashtags; they make general, basic claims about the product; they invent idioms that don’t make any sense. 

I asked ChatGPT to come up with a Facebook post for my bakery (which doesn’t exist), promoting our Easter Sunday special (one free muffin per customer). Here’s what it spat out:

🐣🌸 Easter Sunday Special at [Your Bakery Name]! 🌸🐣

Hop on over this Easter and treat yourself to something sweet! 🧁
We’re celebrating the season with a little extra joy — every customer gets ONE FREE MUFFIN with their visit this Sunday!

Whether you’re craving blueberry, chocolate chip, or something classic, we’ve got the perfect bite waiting for you. Bring your friends, bring your family, and make it a delicious holiday tradition 💛

📅 Easter Sunday only
📍 Stop by early — muffins won’t last long!

#EasterTreats #BakeryLove #FreeMuffin #SweetCelebration

As a copywriter, I hate this so much. Here are a few of the problems:

• It’s using bold for emphasis; Facebook doesn’t support that type of formatting.
• It uses title case; Facebook posts don’t usually do that, so it would look out of place on a real feed.
• There’s a tremendous amount of filler text. 
• The AI decided that we offer blueberry, chocolate chip, or “something classic.” Wait, aren’t blueberry muffins classic? And what if we don’t offer chocolate chip muffins?
• The extensive use of emojis would create accessibility concerns for anyone who uses a screen reader (software that converts text to audio, frequently used by people with vision disabilities). 
• The hashtags are ridiculous. Is there really much traffic for “bakerylove” or “sweetcelebration?”

But the biggest issue is that there is no representation of what makes this bakery special. 

When you’re building a brand, every post has to have that brand image in mind — this is totally generic. 

That’s by design, of course: Generative AI tools basically operate through at-scale plagiarism (and don’t worry, I’ll stop ripping on AI in a moment and provide some tips for using it correctly). They’re not capable of presenting anything but repetitive, grammatically correct drivel.

That’s ChatGPT, and there are other tools out there. Let’s see how Google Gemini handles the job.

🐰 Happy Easter! 🌷

We want to make your Easter Sunday a little sweeter this year, so we’re giving away one free muffin to every customer who stops by the bakery on April 19! 🧁✨

It wasn’t just a regular morning for us today—we’ve been busy prepping all your favorites. Whether you’re a fan of classic blueberry or you want to try something seasonal, come grab a treat on the house before you head to your holiday celebrations.

The Details:

• 🕒 When: This Sunday, April 19 (starting at 7 AM)
• 🧁 The Deal: One free muffin per person
• 🏃‍♂️ Note: We’ll be handing them out until we run out, so try to get here early!

Rather than staying in, come say hi and celebrate with us! We can’t wait to see you. 🐣☕️

The first thing you’ll notice is that this is not the correct format for a Facebook post. Also, Gemini declared blueberry muffins to be “classic,” which is quite validating for me. 

But notice the odd sentence constructions, filler text, and excessive emoji use — those are hallmarks of a generative AI, and they’re also really bad copywriting. 

I would never visit this bakery, even for a classic blueberry muffin. 

By this point, I’ve seen hundreds of small businesses use ChatGPT for their social media posts.

All of those posts look, well, exactly the same. I would show a few examples here, but I don’t want to spend my day dunking on local mom-and-pop coffeeshops. 

And here’s the thing: They’re only using AI because someone told them that it did a good job. If you don’t write for a living, you might look at either of those generated posts and think, “hey, it’s better than I could do.” 

If you have problems writing, or if you have a small budget, of course you’re going to use AI. It seems like a great way to market your business to more people without spending more money. 

But by copying and pasting those posts, you’re sacrificing credibility. AI text posts are obvious, and if you’re using AI to promote your Easter muffins, who’s to say that you’re posting real pictures of those muffins? 

In fact, Gemini is pretty good at creating fake muffins. 

As more organizations lean on AI, authenticity is going to become more and more important for consumers. That’s largely true for every business: No matter what you’re selling, you need to convince a real person to buy it. 

And if your best sales pitch is “here’s what a computer spat out,” you’re not making a compelling argument. 

You can still use generative AI for social media posts, but be thoughtful.

People use AI because it helps them get past the “I need an idea” stage. With AI, you don’t have to sit down with a piece of blank paper and think about strategy; you can just ask your robot buddy for a few ideas (or a complete draft). 

Unfortunately, that blank piece of paper is quite important to the process. That’s the point where you actually create valuable ideas — how you want to present your brand, what will appeal to the customers you already have, how you’ll gain new business, and so on. 

So my first recommendation is simple: Don’t turn to ChatGPT until you’ve got a really good idea of what you want to say. Treat it as an editor, not as a copywriter. You are the copywriter and content strategy planner (unless you’d like to hire us). 

Tell your AI to write like your brand.

Secondly, have a clear, consistent brand, and tell your generative AI how to write to that brand. Maybe you’ve got a wacky bakery with weird art all over the walls; maybe you’ve got a highly professional B2B firm that only targets leads in C-suite positions. Your chat tools will need to know that. 

You can build custom rulesets for any of the major AI text generators. Try adding rules, along with categorization headers (the bits before the colons below) to keep the model on track.

• Persona Anchor: Always write from the perspective of a [job title, e.g., professional baker] at [company name]. The voice should be [trait 1, e.g., authoritative] yet [trait 2, e.g., accessible], catering to an audience of [target demographic].
• Tone Guardrails: Maintain a [tone, e.g., semi-formal] tone. Do not use [style, e.g., corporate buzzwords] or [style, e.g., slang]. If the topic is [subject], ensure the response remains [attribute, e.g., grounded and empathetic].
• Emotional Resonance: When discussing [product/service], emphasize [benefit, e.g., reliability] over [alternative, e.g., speed]. Avoid being overly [negative trait, e.g., salesy or pushy].
• Filler Elimination: Never start an article or post with general filler phrases like [phrase 1, e.g., In today’s world] or [phrase 2, e.g., Our high-tech society]. Instead, begin every piece with a [hook, e.g., specific statistic or historical fact].

You can also create rules for punctuation standards, grammar, emoji use, and so on. If you’re not sure how to make a rule effectively, ask your chatbot. Chatbots are digital idiots, but they know their own rulesets and they’re quite effective at training themselves.

Train, train, train your AI.

Even after you create these rules, generative AI will not be able to represent your brand effectively — here’s what happened when I told Gemini to follow an extensive set of rules to write a post for a “wacky” bakery. 

The earliest known muffin recipe dates back to the 18th century and was basically a way to turn leftover bread into a party! 🧁✨

We’re bringing that party energy to your Easter Sunday with a massive muffin-pocalypse! 🐰🌀

On April 19 we’re giving away one free muffin to every single person who walks through the doors of the bakery! 🎁🎈

The madness kicks off at 7 AM sharp! 🕒

We’ll be handing out these treats until we run out of baked goodness so get here early before the crowd devours everything! 🏃‍♂️💨

You don’t want to miss out on the most exciting morning of the year! 🌈🎊

We can’t wait to celebrate the holiday with some high-speed yeasty mayhem! 🐣🔥

Yes, high-speed yeasty mayhem. Gemini is a bit of a try-hard.

But look, the chatbot will always struggle if it’s working off of rules alone — it can only draw from its training data. 

If, however, you provide dozens of examples of posts that you’ve already written, you can get a lot closer. We’ve written hundreds of industrial B2B articles, so I trained Gemini on those pieces of content and asked it to write another Facebook post announcing a new product for a fake B2B firm:

Unplanned downtime in manufacturing costs industrial organizations roughly $50 billion per year. We designed Fake Product to address these costly interruptions by improving equipment reliability and streamlining daily maintenance tasks.

This new addition to our lineup focuses on maximizing your facility’s throughput while maintaining strict compliance with safety regulations. It’s a practical solution for operations that need to scale without sacrificing efficiency. 

That’s not perfect, but it’s quite aligned with the tone that industrial businesses use. 

We also wrote extensively for a health-oriented website that targeted consumers. Here’s how Gemini handled a “free t-shirt giveaway” for that company:

We’re giving away free t-shirts to celebrate our incredible community! We want you to stay comfortable while you’re crushing your wellness goals, whether you’re hitting the gym for a heavy session or just enjoying a peaceful morning walk. These limited-edition shirts are incredibly soft and perfect for your next active adventure. Drop a comment below with your favorite self-care tip to enter the giveaway and we’ll pick the lucky winners soon! 👕✨

Chatbots tend to make up details, so we’d need to do some cleanup on this post. And it’s still quite generic — but we can fix that.

If at all possible, start with a post written by a human.

Remember when I said that chatbots are better at editing than writing? 

If you can force yourself to sit down and write something, your results will be much better, regardless of how you feel about your abilities as a writer. Let’s go back to the lovely world of free muffins for a moment; I wrote this mediocre announcement post:

Free muffins! lol for real. Easter morning we’ll have free blueberry muffins until about noon or when they run out. We know you’re spending time with your family that day (we will be too) and we want to help you get started the right way. also we’re open on Monday so swing by and we got coffee now too

Here’s an edit from ChatGPT:

Free muffins. Seriously.

Easter morning we’ll have free blueberry muffins for anyone who stops by — until around noon or whenever we run out.

We know you’re spending the day with family (we will be too), just wanted to help you start it off right.

Also — we’re open Monday. Come back and see us. We’ve got coffee now too 😉

I still have a few issues with this, but it’s not too bad. For a small business, it’s perfectly acceptable. Here’s how Gemini handled that task:

Free muffins! Yes, really! 🧁✨

This Easter morning we are giving away free blueberry muffins until 12 PM or until we sell out. We know you are spending time with your family and we want to help you start the holiday the right way.

We are also open this Monday. Stop by to see us and try our new coffee while you are here! ☕️

See you there!

Again: Not perfect, but not bad. 

If you can start with a draft and create clear rules, you’re ahead of the game; if you’ve got a consistent brand, you’re in great shape.

Think about the actual experience of your audience before you post.

You’re using AI, but you’re writing for real people. What do they want? What will get them excited about your business? What voice appeals to them? What drives their loyalty and keeps them coming back?

ChatGPT can’t answer those questions, but you probably already know the answers. To create great content, you’ll need to hyperfocus on your audience when publishing anything, from Facebook and Instagram posts to case studies. 

If you need help crafting a content strategy, we’re here to help (and surprisingly affordable). Send us a message.