You know that feeling when you open ChatGPT with every intention of being productive, type “help me with my social media strategy”, and get back a list so generic it could belong to a dentist, a dog groomer or a SaaS startup?
That’s not AI being useless… that’s a prompt problem.
I’ve been a digital marketing strategist and educator since 2017 and I’ve taught more than 240,000 students. Below are the actual prompts I use to get a real social media strategy out of AI, copy them straight off the page if you like. I’ve also included the one prompt in here that I’ve since changed my mind about… and I’ll be honest with you about why.
The short version
AI writes generic strategies because it’s given generic briefs. The fix is to hand it a structured brief about your business (audience, current presence, goals, resources, USPs, competitors, budget) before you ask it for anything, then run the same brief through more than one AI tool and merge the answers. Do it separately for each platform, because a strategy that works on Instagram won’t work on YouTube.
- Give AI an 11-point brief about your business before asking for a single idea.
- Run the same prompt through ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, then ask one of them to merge the results into a master plan.
- Build a separate strategy per platform rather than one plan for all of them.
- Ask AI to interview YOU before it creates anything: “ask me as many questions as you need”.
- Don’t ask AI to describe your brand voice in adjectives. That was my advice in 2024 and I now think it’s the reason your captions still sound like nobody.
You can watch the whole thing below, or keep reading, both cover the same ground.
Jump to a bit of the video:
1:20 Create a personalised social strategy with AI
6:28 Leveraging Gemini and Claude
8:09 Train ChatGPT to speak like you
12:48 Create a content calendar with AI
14:38 AI image prompts
18:26 Create viral hooks for Reels with AI
I’ve also put every prompt below into a free PDF so you don’t have to sit here copying them out one at a time. Grab that here.
Is AI actually going to replace social media marketers?
No, but it will replace marketers who refuse to use it. The work that disappears is the repetitive drafting. The work that survives is judgement, taste, relationships… and knowing which of AI’s ideas are rubbish.
I know a lot of us are quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) panicking about this. And I do understand it. But the honest position is that your competitors are ALREADY using these tools, and the gap between someone who prompts well and someone who doesn’t is enormous.
What AI genuinely buys you is time. More content in less time means you can charge better rates and spend the hours you get back on the things a model can’t do for you.
How do you get AI to build an actual social media strategy?
Give it a structured brief about your business before you ask for anything. The quality of what comes back is almost entirely determined by what you put in.
Here’s the prompt I use. Fill in every single bracket, and don’t skimp on the detail:
I’m looking for a personalised strategy to grow my business’s [Instagram] following. Here is some information about my business:
1. Business Name and Industry: [Your Business Name], operating in the [Industry] sector.
2. Target Audience: Describe your ideal customer, including age, interests, geographic location and any other relevant demographics.
3. Current [Instagram] Presence: Follower count, average engagement rate, content types and posting frequency.
4. Business Goals with [Instagram]: Your primary goals, for example brand awareness, website traffic or product sales.
5. Content Resources: What you have available, for example a dedicated team, professional equipment, a budget for content creation.
6. Unique Selling Points: What makes your business stand out in your niche.
7. Competitors: Major competitors or similar accounts in your niche.
8. Past Marketing Efforts: What you’ve tried before and how it went.
9. Budget for [Instagram] Growth: If you have a budget for ads or collaborations, specify the amount.
10. Brands you might collaborate with.
11. Plans for User-Generated Content: Do you have any plans for reusing customer content?Based on the information provided, please create a comprehensive and tailored plan for growing my [Instagram] following, with a focus on achieving my business goals and leveraging my available resources.
Do this separately for every platform. This is the bit people skip. A strategy that works on Instagram will not work on YouTube, because the reason people are on each one is completely different. Swap out the platform in the brackets and run it again.
And be specific about the budget… because that changes everything. When I ran this for my own business and told it I had $400, it came back with an actual split between organic and paid rather than the usual “consider investing in advertising”.
Why run the same prompt through more than one AI tool?
Because they genuinely disagree with each other, and the disagreement is where the good stuff is.
I run the exact same brief through ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. When I did it for my own course business, ChatGPT went heavy on engagement tactics while Claude pushed lead magnets, including one I liked so much I actually used it. Same prompt, same information, meaningfully different plans.
Then the move that saves you the sorting time:
Here are three social media strategies for my business, generated by different AI tools. Please combine them into one master plan, keeping the strongest ideas from each and removing anything that repeats or contradicts.
Paste all three in, and you get one document to work from instead of three you’ll never open again. Then delete whatever doesn’t suit you… which will be some of it, and that’s completely normal.
How do you train AI to write in your brand voice?
This is the section I need to be honest about, because I’ve changed my mind since I recorded this video.
What I said in 2024: give AI one of your captions and ask it to describe your tone of voice, then reuse that description everywhere. The prompt was this:
In a minute I’m going to provide you with an example of an Instagram caption I’ve written for my business. I want you to analyse this caption and write a short paragraph about what you believe my brand voice to be based on this copy, starting the paragraph with “This brand’s tone of voice is”. Are you ready for the caption?
And it works, in the sense that it gives you something. Mine came back as “This brand’s tone of voice is authentic, relatable and self-reflective, with a strong emphasis on personal growth and learning.”
Which sounds lovely… and is completely useless.
Here’s what I’ve since worked out. When a model reads “authentic and relatable”, it doesn’t picture you. It pictures the AVERAGE of every authentic, relatable thing it has ever read. So you ask for the average… and then you’re surprised when you get the average back. That paragraph of adjectives is very likely the reason your AI captions still sound like nobody in particular.
An adjective is a vibe. What you actually want is rules… because a rule is checkable.
So instead of a description, build a list of things that are true about how you write. Real examples from mine:
- I use ellipses a lot, as a pause before a reveal, not just to trail off.
- I put single words in capitals for emphasis, like SO or NO, but never a whole sentence.
- British spelling, always.
- I open with a small everyday moment, never a statistic.
- I write at roughly an 8th-grade reading level.
And then add the part that does more heavy lifting than anything else: a banned list. Describing your voice nudges the model. Banning things shoves it. Mine includes never using a long em dash, no corporate speak like “circle back” or “move the needle”, and no internet reaction slang, because when I asked for casual the model went sailing straight past casual into a TikTok voice that is nothing like how I talk.
If you only take one thing from this post, make it that. Swap the adjectives for rules and bans.
How do you get AI to analyse your existing profile?
Ask it to look at your bio as a strategist would, once it already knows your business and your voice rules.
Acting as a social media strategist, I want you to analyse my Instagram bio. Knowing what you now know about my brand, what improvements could be made? What type of content would you expect to see on an account like this? Please rewrite my bio accordingly and include a memorable tagline using my brand voice.
The “what content would you expect to see” half is the useful bit, and most people skip straight past it. If AI’s expectation of your account doesn’t match what you’re actually posting, your bio is promising something you’re not delivering.
How do you build a month’s content calendar with AI?
Make it interview you first, then ask for the calendar in a table so it comes out usable rather than as an essay.
Before you ask for anything creative, use this:
In a minute I’m going to ask you to create some social media content for my business. Before we begin, I want you to fully understand my business and customers. Ask me as many questions as you need about my business, audience and anything else you need in order to complete the task to the best of your ability.
Let it interrogate you. It’s a bit of an odd experience the first time… but the questions it asks are often better than the brief you would have written.
Then:
Knowing what you now know about my business, I want you to act as the very best social media strategist and copywriter in the world. You also know how to properly launch, grow and nurture audiences on social media.
With this in mind, I need you to create a content calendar for [business] of 30 single image posts for Instagram. Add your ideas to a table with the following columns: overarching topic, a summary of the content to post, the caption for the post including any relevant hashtags, and an AI image prompt in the last column.
The image prompts should include a simple description of the image, 3 descriptive keywords for the style, the type of camera lens, and a post-processing technique.
That last column is the trick. You get a month of posts AND the image brief for each one in the same table, so you can take the prompts straight to whichever image tool you use, or hand them to a designer, or just use them as a starting point in Canva.
How do you get AI to write hooks for Reels?
Work from your audience’s problems, not from your topics. Three prompts, run in order, and don’t skip the middle one.
First, the topics:
I want to make Instagram Reels content that’s going to attract my ideal followers, clients and customers. As a reminder, I help [audience] to [what you help them with]. Please list the top 7 topics I should be making content about.
Then the part that makes the difference:
Next, for each topic, please list: 3 of the most common mistakes they’re making, 3 fears, 3 desires and results they want, and 3 frustrating symptoms my customers experience. Please describe each in 2 sentences, being as specific and descriptive as possible.
And then the hooks:
Using all of these, please generate 24 hooks, or strong starting statements to start an Instagram Reel with. These statements should capture attention, make people curious and make them watch my video. They should use the following hook templates:
1. The #1 mistake you’re making that’s stopping you from [achieving specific goal].
2. This may be controversial but [insert controversial but true opinion].
3. Stop doing [common thing your audience is doing wrong]. Do this instead.
4. When you finally figure out how to [get specific result your audience wants], without [specific thing your audience hates doing].
The reason the middle prompt matters so much is that hooks built from fears and frustrations land, and hooks built from topics don’t. “5 tips for better lighting” is a topic. “The #1 mistake that’s making your videos look cheap” came from a fear. Same information, completely different scroll-stopping power.
What’s changed since I filmed this
The prompts all still work, and I’d use every one of them today apart from the brand voice one I’ve already flagged. Two other things worth knowing if you’re starting now.
AI image generation has moved on enormously. In the video I used Leonardo.ai for the image prompts, and it was genuinely good at the time. The whole category has shifted since, and the tools built into ChatGPT and Canva have got a lot better. Use whatever you already pay for before you go signing up for something new. The image prompt column in that calendar table works in any of them.
Free plans have got tighter. Free ChatGPT will still give you useful output from these prompts, but there are real limits now on things like how many files you can attach to a project. If you’re doing this seriously, a paid plan pays for itself quickly. But please don’t upgrade until you’ve felt the limits, because paying for a better model is worth nothing at all if you’re still giving it a two-line brief.
So where do you start?
Open a new chat, paste in the 11-point brief, and fill in every bracket properly. That one step is the difference between a strategy for your business and a strategy for a generic business in your industry.
Then work down: run it through a second tool, merge them, build your voice rules and your banned list, let it interview you, get the calendar, then the hooks.
And if all of this is brand new to you, don’t panic, I had no idea what any of it meant a few years ago either. Do the first prompt and stop there… that alone will get you further than most people manage.
Every prompt on this page is in a free PDF you can grab here, so you don’t have to copy them out. If you want the full system rather than the prompts, more than 40,000 students have been through my social media marketing course and there’s 20% off there. And once you’ve got a strategy, my 7-step plan for building a social media presence from scratch is the natural next read.
Give it a whirl, and let me know what the AI comes back with. I’d love to know whether it argues with you.
Originally published October 2024, updated August 2026. The brand voice section has been corrected: the original advice is left in place so you can see what changed and why.
