Do you spend too much time creating social media posts to market your language school courses effectively? Are you struggling to create social media content and write engaging captions to attract new students? AI-powered tools like ChatGPT may be just what you need to streamline your social media post creation and achieve your goals more efficiently. Let’s find out!

GPT-3 is a powerful AI language model that can generate human-like text and perform various language tasks, including marketing your language courses and creating social media posts. While AI can help boost your productivity, it won’t do miracles for your social media marketing if you don’t have a solid strategy in place.

If you don’t have a strategy, then you aren’t doing social media marketing but you are doing social media posting. The latter will not bring you the results you are looking for so it’s worth considering having a strategy if you don’t have one in the first place.

Organic social media will help you be more visible and attract students. There are two important stages. One is about attracting students in marketing jargon this is the top of the funnel of the “journey” towards the classroom. Another important stage is convincing students that have already found you on social media to study with you. At this stage, you need to bring them closer to you i.e in marketing jargon, you need to move them down the funnel.  

There are other stages as well but these two here above are the ones where organic social media will help you the most.

It is important for you to know that for each stage you will need specific steps that need to be strategically taken.

What you need to know before using ChatGPT for Social Media Post Creation

Before you start using ChatGPT you will need to understand your potential student, set SMART objectives, analyse your competitors and so on which is part of the strategy and also choose your content pillars.

Once you have your content pillars and all the topics you’ll put in your content strategy you can start using ChatGPT. I don’t recommend asking ChatGPT for example what you can post about on social media to attract a certain type of student and relying only on what it says because it lacks your context and knowledge of the market.

It will, however, come up with some interesting ideas for you but you should go through them carefully and take them as ideas to spark more ideas based on your context and objectives.

ChatGPT can write lesson plans and it can also write your social media strategy but remember a strategy isn’t one size fits all. Also, if you want chatGT to write your social media calendar you need to know exactly what your objectives are and what your target audience’s pain points and desires are to be able to prompt it effectively for initial acceptable results.  

How ChatGPT can be used to assist with creating social media posts for language schools

Once the strategy is in place I think that as a school owner, teacher or front office you will certainly find “collaborating” with AI quite useful and time-effective in the long run.

Writing effective copy is a skill that not everyone possesses. This is especially true for those whose expertise lies in English language teaching, such as teachers and school owners, or for front desk staff whose primary responsibilities are administrative but also include managing social media for their language school. However, with ChatGPT, these challenges can be easily overcome.

Prompting: The secret skill to get the best out of ChatGPT

ChatGPT will give you the answers you are looking for and the quality of that will depend on the quality of your prompts. The more precise, focused and detailed they are the better the social media post copy produced for you will be.  

You will need to prompt AI, prompts will be based on our content strategy with your potential student features (aka buyer personas) clearly in mind in a way that you can give AI a good effective prompt.

This means that you need to give AI context about the topic of the post, indicate the tone of voice, style the target audience and the result. You may also want to prompt what words to avoid, what desired outcome to include and the effect you want in the reader.

Examples of ChatGPT prompts for social media posts for ELT marketing

What else can ChatGPT do to help language schools with generating social media posts?

To make social media posts more engaging and compelling you can also ask ChatGPT or any other AI-powered tool to:

• Generate Hooks
• Generate Call to Actions
• Improve copy
• Generate comments

Prompts to generate hooks and CTAs with AI

As you know every social media post used for marketing should start with a hook to grab the reader’s attention and end with a CTA (call to action)  . You can prompt the system to include all parts or you can prompt it to get just the hook or CTA of a copy you’ve written. Paste your copy and prompt it.

Examples:

• Write a call to action for a business English company course aimed at human resource managers to convince them to book a demo lesson.
• Write a CTA for an English language conversation class for adults that persuades the reader to book a demo lesson.

Improving the creation of social media posts with ChatGPT

Another way of using it is to get feedback from a copy or post text you’ve written and ask AI to improve it to make it more compelling based on your objectives.

Then compare both versions and check what would work best from both to create a copy that does exactly what you need for your language school marketing.

AI is getting everywhere and many social media tools have integrated it like SocialBee or Canva so you can prompt AI inside the platform, and organize and schedule your posts.

Generating a reply to a social media comment with AI

Did you know that AI extensions and plugins can be embedded and do the comments for you on social media?! Check Engage AI, the Google Chrome extension that does exactly that.

Having this extension might be tempting but it is counterproductive as it may lead to spamming and being banned from the platform.

Example of prompt to reply to a comment for ChatGPT

“Write a friendly reply for this comment on Linkedin to make the conversation continue [paste comment]”

Social media is about building relationships through genuine content so the best thing to do is to write your own comments!

Drawbacks of using ChatGPT for Social Media Post Creation.

ChatGPT gathers information inserted in the net until 2021 because of this the post content may be inaccurate if the topic is more recent or about current events and trends.

Another point to consider is that ChatGPT has been trained based on the internet’s big data. This means that the content could be biased as in the example in the screenshot below.

I prompted it with “Scrivi un post per la presentazione di un corso serale di inglese per adult” (Write a post to present an evening English language course for adults)

Unfortunately, it wrote a post using “mother tongue teachers “ as a unique selling point. This shows that the internet is literally flooded with the term when it comes to this type of post.

If you find that there’s something inappropriate or inaccurate you can send feedback. In this case, I gave feedback and said that mentioning “madrelingua” fosters discrimination against non-native teachers in Italy and the employment of unqualified English language teachers.

Once prompted you will get your copy in seconds and you will see that although it is grammatically correct and it sounds great it will need to be made more representative of your style and personality.

How to personalize social media post content created by ChatGPT?

Indicating the tone of voice for your posts is key when prompting AI. Check if the tone of voice is in line with yours. See if it sounds good or if it sounds too “robotic” or impersonal. Obviously, you don’t want that so you need to make it more “yours” and “you”

You can prompt it again by pasting the copy and saying the exact tone of voice you want.

Example:

“Act as a social media manager. Rewrite this post to make it sound thought-provoking. [paste comment]”

Tips to check chatGPT’s content from ChatGPT’s blog :

1. “Review the suggestions and choose the one that resonates with you the most. You can also ask GPT-3 to elaborate on a specific suggestion or provide additional ideas.
2. Edit and format the suggestion to fit the tone and style of your social media channels. GPT-3’s suggestions are not always perfect, so you may need to make some adjustments to make them work for your audience.
3. Post the final version on your social media channels and see how it performs! Don’t be afraid to experiment and try out different types of prompts and see what works best for your audience”.

Final thoughts: using ChatGPT vs collaborating with an ELT Marketing Consultant?

In conclusion, tools like ChatGPT can certainly make social media post creation easier and more efficient. However, it’s important to remember that social media marketing is much more than just creating content. A well-planned and executed strategy is necessary to truly see success and achieve your language school’s goals.

If you’re a language service provider looking to improve your social media presence and drive more enrolments, it’s time to consider collaborating with an ELT marketing consultant. By working with a consultant, you can gain a deeper understanding of how social media marketing works through tailored consultancy sessions and training. Also, an ELT marketing consultant can develop a customized strategy that fits your specific needs and goals and ultimately see real results.

Don’t wait any longer to start taking your social media marketing seriously and get results from it. Contact me today to learn more about my ELT marketing services and start building your language school’s presence on social media. Stop posting, and start marketing your language business!