Most of the AI advice you’ll find for social media is the same four things. Write my captions. Make me a content calendar. Give me thirty hooks. Rewrite this so it sounds less like a robot.
All useful… and all completely obvious by now.
So this one is about the stuff nobody mentions: training a chatbot on everything you’ve ever made so it can answer questions the way you would, generating a hundred ad variations from your brand colours, and finding out whether a course idea will make you any money before you spend six months building it. I’m Maggie Stara, I teach freelancers and small business owners how to actually use AI in their social media marketing, and these are the six angles I think are genuinely underused.
The short version
The six most underused AI plays in social media are: predicting trends before they peak, cloning your own expertise into a chatbot, running sentiment analysis on what people say about you, generating branded visuals and ad variations in bulk, writing separately for each audience segment, and predicting whether a campaign or product will work before you launch it. Most of these have a free or cheap way in.
- Trend prediction tools like Exploding Topics and BuzzSumo tell you what is about to take off, not just what is popular now.
- You can train an AI on your entire back catalogue so it answers your audience in your words while you sleep.
- Social listening tools read the emotion behind mentions of your brand, not just the star rating.
- AI ad tools can turn your logo, fonts and colours into well over a hundred creative variations in one go.
- Idea validation tools score a course or book idea against what has already sold, before you build it.
You can watch the whole thing below, or keep reading, both cover the same ground.
Jump to a bit of the video:
1:10 Anticipate trending topics
2:31 AI for customer engagement
4:44 AI social listening tools
6:29 AI for epic branded visuals
8:54 AI-generated ads
10:20 Automate creative copywriting
13:25 AI for content localisation
17:00 Validate your course idea with AI
Quick note before we go on. I filmed this in November 2024 and I’ve re-checked every tool in it for this update. Three things have properly changed since then, and I’ve flagged each one where it comes up rather than pretending the video is frozen in time.
Can AI tell you what’s going to trend before it trends?
Yes, to a point. Tools like Exploding Topics and BuzzSumo use historical search and engagement data to flag topics that are climbing, so you can get in early rather than arriving four weeks after everyone else.
This is the bit of AI content research that almost nobody uses, because most people stop at “ChatGPT, plan my month”. Which is fine, and I’ve got a whole separate walkthrough on building your social media strategy with AI if that’s the level you want.
But knowing something is about to take off changes your priorities, not just your calendar. You might have a topic sat in your ideas list pencilled in for six months’ time, and one of these tools tells you it’s climbing now. That’s a genuinely different decision to make.
Fair warning: the prediction features on both sit behind paid plans… and they aren’t cheap. So this one is really for businesses where a single well-timed piece of content pays for the subscription.
Whatever you do with it, keep the balance. You want some virally shareable stuff for reach, and plenty of evergreen core content that actually deepens the relationship. A feed made entirely of trend-chasing is exhausting to make and forgettable to read.
Can you train an AI to answer your audience the way you would?
Yes, and this is the one I find most interesting. Tools like Coachvox AI ingest everything you’ve ever published, your videos, courses, blog posts, emails, and build a chatbot that answers in your voice and makes recommendations the way you would.
The obvious use is customer-facing… something that talks to your audience at 3am, points them to the right resource, and quietly does the job of a middle-of-funnel nurture sequence.
The less obvious use is internal. Imagine your team being able to ask the founder chatbot how something works, or why a decision was made three years ago, instead of interrupting an actual human. For a business with any history behind it, that’s a lot of hours back.
As of August 2026, Coachvox runs at $99 a month for the do-it-yourself plan, with a 14-day trial. Not nothing, but far less than what the equivalent human hours cost.
One update: in the video I also mentioned Drift alongside Intercom for conversational chatbots. Drift was acquired by Salesloft, then sunset in March 2026, so it’s no longer an option. Intercom is still very much going, and there’s a healthy field of alternatives now.
What is AI sentiment analysis and is it worth paying for?
Sentiment analysis is AI reading the emotion and attitude behind what people say about you, rather than just counting mentions. Tools like Dash Hudson and Sprinklr pull comments, posts, reviews, survey responses and support emails into one place and tell you how people actually feel.
Because here’s the thing… reviews only tell you about the people who bothered to leave one. The real conversation about your brand is scattered across comment sections and group chats and replies you never see, and none of it is neatly labelled one star or five.
Is it worth it? Honestly, for most solo creators… no. These are expensive, complex platforms and if you’ve got a few hundred customers you can just read your comments. Where it earns its keep is at the scale where thousands of people buy from you every day and customer sentiment can shift without anyone noticing until it’s a problem.
Which AI image tools actually work for business graphics?
Recraft is the one I reach for when I need a set of images in a consistent style, and Ideogram is still the best I’ve found at generating readable text inside an image. Most general image models are still noticeably weak at both of those things.
Recraft’s ability to produce a collection of images that look like they belong together is the useful part. That’s exactly what a carousel needs, and it’s what makes AI images usable as brand assets rather than one-off curiosities. Ideogram earns its place because typography inside generated images has been the last stubborn problem, and it handles it far better than most.
An important correction to what I said in the video: I described Recraft’s free plan as fine for business assets. That’s no longer true. The free tier now watermarks output, publishes your images to the community gallery, and does not license them for commercial use. So if you’re making anything you’ll actually post for a business, you need the paid plan. That’s a real change and I’d rather flag it than leave you with a copyright problem.
If you just want to dip a toe in, the image generation built into ChatGPT’s paid plan is the lowest-friction starting point, because it’s sitting in a tool you’re probably already paying for.
Can AI generate hundreds of social posts and ad creatives from your brand?
Yes. AdCreative.ai takes your colours, fonts and assets and generates well over a hundred creative variations in one pass, including product mock-ups for e-commerce. Marky does something similar for organic social: you give it your website, it extracts your branding and audience, you correct anything it got wrong, and it produces a month of branded posts with captions.
I want to be straight with you about who these are for. If your social media goal is growth, community and actual relationships, a tool that mass-produces posts is not going to get you there. If your goal is maintenance, having a presence so you don’t look abandoned when someone checks you out, they are brilliant and they’ll save you your weekends.
Current pricing, as of August 2026: AdCreative.ai has no free tier at all, just a 7-day trial with 10 credits, and plans start around $29 a month. Marky starts at $39 a month for a solo plan with a free trial. Both changed since I filmed, so check before you commit.
How do you use AI to write for different audience segments?
Give the AI your brand tone of voice, one specific customer avatar, and the product, then ask it for copy aimed at that one person. Repeat for each segment. Tools like Jasper and Copy.ai are built for exactly this, though you can get a long way with a well-briefed ChatGPT or Claude.
The real value here isn’t speed… it’s getting out of your own head. Writing for someone whose life looks nothing like yours is genuinely hard. If you’re allergic to dogs, working out what a pug obsessive wants to hear is close to impossible, and most of us just quietly write for ourselves instead. That’s where a lot of flat marketing comes from.
It also saves you money on split testing, because you can generate five real variations to test rather than guessing at two.
One rule I will not budge on: always read and tweak whatever AI gives you before it goes out. Even when it’s good, there’ll be something small. Mine constantly forgets I use British spelling, and if your audience knows where you’re from, an “optimize” in the middle of your caption is a tiny tell that you didn’t write it.
What’s the difference between AI translation and AI localisation?
Translation converts your words. Localisation makes the result sound like a local wrote it… adjusting tone, idiom and cultural references. Tools like Unbabel and Localize handle the second one, which is the version that actually works.
This is criminally underused by small creators and heavily used by big ones. Gary Vaynerchuk translates titles, descriptions and captions on his videos. Lewis Howes goes further and dubs entire episodes. Both are reaching audiences that would otherwise scroll straight past.
You don’t have to start with dubbing. Translated captions and titles on your existing videos is a small job with a surprisingly large payoff, and it doubles as an accessibility improvement for the audience you already have.
Can AI predict whether a campaign will work before you launch it?
To a useful degree, yes. Predictive ad platforms score your creatives against historical data from tens of thousands of campaigns and give you a predicted click-through rate plus an appeal score, so you can kill the weakest ads before spending anything on them.
Genus AI is the one I pointed at in the video. It ranks creatives on likely click-through and on how people are likely to feel about the ad. The point isn’t that the prediction is perfect, it’s that it shortens your testing phase, and testing is where most small ad budgets quietly disappear.
Full disclosure: I couldn’t independently confirm how actively Genus AI is being developed in 2026, so treat that specific name as a starting point rather than a recommendation. The category is real and there are several players in it now.
Can AI tell you whether a course idea will sell?
Yes, and this is the one I wish had existed when I started. Eurekaa scores a course, book or how-to idea against a database of hundreds of thousands of existing course listings and millions of book titles, plus enrolment and search-trend data, and tells you whether there’s a market and whether it’s already saturated.
You get a viability score, how many competing courses exist, roughly how many students are enrolled in them, and an estimate of what those courses have earned. Which is a very different conversation to “I have a feeling this will do well”.
My first course was thirty-two hours long, built for an audience that turned out not to want it, and I found that out after I’d made it. If you want the full post-mortem, it’s in what 240,000 students taught me about course creation. A validation tool would have saved me the better part of a year.
It’s also not a subscription you need to keep… validate the idea, cancel, move on.
Where should you actually start with this?
Pick one… not six.
If you sell courses or coaching, start with idea validation, because it’s the cheapest way to avoid the most expensive mistake. If you run ads, start with the creative generation tools, because that’s where you’ll see the money back fastest. If you’re drowning in just keeping your accounts alive, start with something like Marky and buy yourself the time.
And if none of this is your problem yet, the honest answer is that getting your basic social media plan right will do more for you than any tool on this list. Fancy AI on top of no strategy is still no strategy.
If you want a starting point built around your actual business rather than a generic checklist, my free personalised marketing plan is the thing I’d point you to first. And everything I teach lives here if you want to go deeper on any of it.
Give one of them a whirl and let me know which one actually stuck. I’m always curious which of these people keep using six months later, because it’s rarely the one I expect.
Originally published November 2024. Every tool re-checked and pricing updated August 2026.
