AI: Hype or Help? - Social Media Edition

You call yourself a digital nomad. Is that right?

That's correct.

How often are you roughly moving around?

It depends. I was 3 months in Bali and I was about to go to Australia and then I don't need social media but I want social media.

That's right.

You know, you want to know if it's a good idea of this business idea has potential as a business. It's very different,

right?

It's very different. Something it's happening a lot more especially with AI which is our topic today. I think we need to learn how to use it. I think we need to learn how not to abuse it. Learn yourself first and then delegate because at the end of the day, who's doing the selling is you.

We don't believe that AI can sweep people's jobs aside. Good day and welcome to the show. I'm your host Pete Cooper and our topic is AI hype or help. Today's guest is Anna Torres Walker. She's a social media mentor. She helps businesses and entrepreneurs with their social networks, making their social media effective and stress-free. Now, AI is coming along and it's changing the landscape for social media, but social media is very important for many businesses. So, this is a key topic to understand. And we're going to find out from Anna what she thinks about AI and social media. Let's get into it. Welcome, Anna. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.

And how are you doing today?

Thank you for having me. I'm doing good. I'm doing great. I'm traveling a little bit, so it's always good.

Okay. So, where are you at the moment?

I'm in Madrid at the moment. So, yeah, I've been traveling around Spain for the last month.

And I think you call yourself a digital nomad. Is that right?

That's correct. That is correct. And what's that like being a digital nomad?

Well, it is actually I've been a nom a digital person for quite a long time, but I wasn't that nomad and not at least as much as I wanted to be. So now that I am doing it, it's I I love it. It's that was one of the main goals when I changed careers.

I just wanted this to be able to work from everywhere or anywhere and travel as much as possible. So it's it's perfect for me. Is the best of two worlds,

traveling and working online from wherever I am.

Yeah. And and so if you're Does that mean you're switching locations every day, every week, every month, every year? How often are you roughly moving around?

It depends. Like this month it's been every week and before that I was three months in Bali and I was about to go to Australia and then uh some I had a fall and I had to go back home. It can be months, it can be weeks, it can be days. It all depends.

Well, I interviewed somebody only a week or two ago who's also a digital nomad and he was in Russia and then he was back in the US and he was also exploring that and then I met some people on the weekend that were telling me that somebody tried to be a digital nomad and they were ex exhausted and they didn't want to do it anymore. So, how long have you been doing it, Anna?

Um, I would say it's been on and off for two years. No, three years. Two almost three years on and off. So it's obviously not all the year. Sometimes it's two or three months of the year. Sometimes it's weeks. And the longest I've been so far is 3 months that I that was when I was this year in Bali.

But yeah, I mean I've been traveling four years now for two or three months, five months in a row

and I love it. So I do have friends who are not digital noms but they do like traveling and they still they they find the same as you were saying. They they they get exhausted about from it and I don't I just love it.

All right. Well, it seems to seems like it suits you. Well, I guess an important aspect of that is how you sustain yourself and what is your business. So, Anna, tell us in brief what you do.

Well, I'm a social media mentor. What that means is I'm a person who's been in social media long enough to be able to help others

achieve their goals in social media basically.

So um I've been a social media manager for over 10 years now. So managing other people's companies, business owners uh social networks for them. And then now I'm mentoring those um entrepreneur social um sorry uh business owners how to manage their own social media, their their business social media. This is something it's happening a lot more especially with AI which is our topic today. Mhm.

And I realized that this is going to be going on and it's a trending and a trend and it's going it's growing in that way that business owners are doing it DIY, you know, they're doing it more themselves.

So, let's do it but in a more professional sustainable way and learn how to do it the best way for you. Yeah. So, that's the idea. And so when we talk about social media just for anyone that's new to the the subject [gasps] who isn't but you know what sort of platforms are most commonly used in social media?

Well I mean it all depends on the business but in my case my experience is so my expertise is Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Those are the three social networks I work on and the ones I teach about. I am not into Tik Tok. I do not like Tik Tok. I think it's a generational thing as well, but it's not for me.

Um, but of course, if someone comes across and they need Tik Tok, I do have people for that. Um, YouTube of course is it's growing a lot and it's very useful. But it all depends on the on business and what are your goals? What do you want? So, not every business has to be in each on every network

should be actually the opposite. You need to figure out where you should be.

All right. So you said Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. You dropped in YouTube there. Do you see YouTube as a social media platform or is it something else?

I think it's a mixture. It's a bit like LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a social network more networking looking for jobs, but it does have that um social network aspect like Facebook does. So YouTube has

a little bit like Tik Tok that information especially YouTube you have a lot of information causes whatever you want

but it it also has that little bit of social network cuz there is comments and stuff and you know if you're a YouTuber and you want to make a living out of it that is part of the growing process. So people engaging

and interacting that's going to help your channel grow.

Mhm. So, I guess you're talking to business owners. Do you ever find them saying, "I don't think I need to have any social media. "

Less and less.

I mean, I do, you know, occasionally there's people obviously they don't come to me saying, "I don't need social media, but I want social media. "

That's right.

You know, that's it does happen that way that a lot of people say, you know, I know I need it, but I just can't be bothered. That sort of thing does happen. But people who are like, "Yeah, why do I want social media for? " It depends. Again, it depends on the niche. It depends on the business. I've been the one to say to some people, listen, your business is okay. You have the client coming through the door constantly. Is a business that it's rarely going to go down.

Why do you want social media so far?

If you're not gonna if you're not going to keep it, if you're not going to maintain it, then you shouldn't be on social media. If you have social media and it's not representing and not coherent with you and your business, it's better that you are out of social media.

That's the most important thing,

I guess. Then let's land the plane on on on the ground. What does social media actually do for a business

nowadays? How the organic um reach is working and it's changing rapidly in the last two years has been changing a lot.

Social media nowadays is like your menu in a restaurant or your portfolio in a photography shop or you know or if you're an estate agent you have all those pictures of the houses. That is what social media is to to businesses today and that's how we should treat it. Um, I always say it's [clears throat] not a magical one. It's it's a tool.

So, we need to learn how to use it. And today, social media is more for positioning. And a lot of people come to me saying, I want people to find me when they look for me, but when they do look for me and they find me to see a coherent um information, image, whatever it is. So, that's what it is really. This positioning is is also u validation.

It's for people who find you through an ad, for example. The first thing they're going to do is go to your social um social media networks. They're going to go to your profile and they're going to go there's nothing there or whatever it is from two or three years ago, they're going to go they they're not going to trust. It's like those reviews on Trip Advisor, for example. You go through those

when you want to buy, do you want to rent a a hotel or flight, whatever it is, we always look for some type of, you know, information that's going to give us more to trust more, right?

That's basically what it is.

Yeah. So, I mean, just to summarize that, so we've got the idea of a menu.

In other words, it's it's what you offer. It's uh establishing uh an easy way for someone to see and understand that and to see the history of that and then also to the the trust element, the credibility. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead. So, do people is it now enough to rely on that what we just mentioned and then someone goes and buys or is there still something else that's needed to close a deal?

100%.

There's not that's not enough anymore and it's not been enough for some time and this is what I always say you need to so the way algorithms work especially Instagram is they're more the people stay in your picture or your post or your profile the better it is for you but we forget that we need to send them somewhere to do something because at the end of the day you're a business trying to sell something a service or a product so you need to create a funnel you need to create that system in which in every step that potential client is going to do something.

What's the whether that is a WhatsApp message or you're sending them to a landing page where they're going to click on some form and you know whatever it is but there needs to be something they cannot you cannot rely just on posting and some advertising you know occasionally again some businesses do have that that you know they just post and it works but that is less and less common every time every Okay. Yeah.

Right. So, that's a new concept uh is advertising. So, do you see that people need to advertise as well as uh post content or can they just get away with content?

Again, it depends on the niche. It depends on the business and depends on your objectives.

If you are there to sell whatever that is, service or product, you most likely going to have some type of advertising. Yes. And and we see every day that even with the organic, you want to help the growth of your uh community. You want to help um help the growth of the engagement. So the likes, the comments, all that. And sometimes now you do need to add a little bit of money. Sometimes it's nothing. Like I do 24 hours promo for €3, which is nothing. But it does help the engagement a lot. And that is also helping the algorithm. So it's very common. Before in the past it would be no no and now it's you have to most of the time you have to.

So

it's part of your business strategy.

You need to think okay I need social media and then eventually I'm going to have some sort of you know advertisement some sort of way to direct the people towards where you want them to do whatever you want them to do. I always say we need to attract them, keep them as much as possible for the algorithm, but then we have to take them out of Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is, we need to send them somewhere. And also it is very important to understand that um whatever it is they doing afterwards at the end of the day who's doing the selling is you. And that is through personal contact. That is the only way we sell.

It's by on the phone or you know online meeting or uh in you know in person meeting whatever it is you are the one selling your product and your service.

Yeah. Yeah. Well that's very interesting that that's a great landscape. So to summarize your business maybe tell us about um the model clients the type of clients that you particularly like to to to have what what are they like an avatar for them? Well, most of them are people who have been working with their social media networks for at least one year and they're struggling. Some of them enjoy it even they struggle.

But the most important thing is that they have been doing it for some time because they know what it is like.

They understand and they actually value whatever is help is coming their way. They're going to be very appreciative of it. So they are actually looking for that. What they are looking for is someone who's going to guide them through the right, you know, um, hurdles, h, give them the right tips, give them the right directions, but also allow them to be them themselves more and more. And also, I've realized that a lot of the issues most of these people, business owners, entrepreneurs, whatever they are, how long they've been in the business, they don't have and they can be very, very organized in their business.

But in social media they don't have strategy for for example that is out of the window but organization skills they do not have the system which helps them organize and you know make the most of their time and I always say I like to say that I'm going to teach you that and then you're going to focus in what's really important which is your business. You're not working for Instagram or Facebook. This is just a tool. This is just a communication part part um system. So that is the idea. People who already doing it, they want to keep doing it but they want to make it they want to master it. That would be the right word.

Are you are you getting people from all over the world?

I'm getting mainly from Spain for now but actually I do have some interesting people coming. Yeah, there's yeah there's some people around from India. So the senator is coming from different places which is quite surprising to me because you know India for instance in terms of social media they're very you know high up in in social media community managers and that and yeah I think it's very interesting that I'm getting some yeah people wanting to know more about it.

Excellent. So Anna [clears throat] know that's great. Let's segue into the theme of things uh which is on everyone's lips at the moment and that's AI. Um, what have you seen in your world which has changed most recently?

Have you seen something occurring? Is there a change in direction now? It's it's such an inflection point. What are you seeing going on? Yeah.

Well, what I see and and actually I'm quite surprised. I was at lunch with my niece's um friend. She's actually studying marketing here in Madrid and they are teaching them how to use the AI and I was like ah this is good because you know they it's not easy that universities adapt so easily to something so new and so changing that changes so much.

So that is one thing that I realized that it's becoming very common of course um but also the implementation of it is becoming easier and there's a lot of information and causes and things you can do to to learn how to do it in a more professional way and I think it's the new trend like yesterday there was an event in Madrid about AI and there were YouTubers and photo you know all these things But I think there still has a it has a long way to go in many different departments. But I think again it's all depending on how you use it. It it's [clears throat] a tool.

Yeah. So

and that's what it is.

One of the tools that comes immediately to mind is the ability to create content.

Um lots and lots of content. There's many tools out there that can take your face and create videos that say things that you don't even need to understand and that can be posted as as content. You can create articles which you can create as blogs. I mean I heard a statistic that 50% of the comments that are created by bots which is AI generated content. Um, what's your thoughts about using AI for generating content?

In general or just in comments? In general?

Yeah. Well, let's start in general and we can go to comments. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'd use it. For example, I'm one to when you know Chad GPT came out and I was the typical, yeah, nah, this is not going to last.

I was very apprehensive.

Yes,

I was. I must admit it. And but I never was one of those that when it gradually grow grew, I never thought, oh yes, of course, some businesses or or jobs are going to disappear, but those are the jobs that, you know, they're no longer adapting to the new systems. But I think it's very useful. I think for us in my world, if you learn how to use it, in my case, it's boom. It's mind-blowing. It's helping me a lot.

I think we need to learn how to use it. I think we need to learn how not to abuse it.

That is very important.

And for people who don't know how to use it, they need to be very aware that posting whatever you get from ChatGPT or any other AI directly, it cannot it doesn't always work.

Yes. So especially nowadays in my job in in social media in which humanizing the brand is the new trend as well. So we need to be very aware. So you need to to teach your AI how you are who you are, how you speak, how you write, how you whatever in terms of video and pictures and photography.

I mean they it's amazing

but

we need to be careful cuz sometimes it's very confusing that is it this real is not real depends on the content we also need to be I think we need to be very critical I don't know how to say we need to be very aware of what we see

and not believe straight away what we see

you know you need to

filter a little bit the information but yeah I think is very useful.

Yeah, these tools are notorious for what they call hallucinations, aren't they? Where you put in a a question or request or a prompt and then it spits back a story at you and in inside there there's facts. And this has happened to me multiple times.

What I always do and I encourage my team to do as well is to use the tools but make sure you insert your I say insert your brain in there and make sure that everything that is there you can stand behind and that you've that you know uh and it's interesting I mean we can talk about generations just to segue real briefly got a very young team Gen Z's predominantly there's a lot of things that you know when you get to sort of my age you know inherently that something's right and wrong they're not picking up on a lot of that.

So they can often be misled very very easily by what they read on ChatGPT whereas I and people of my generation just just know straight away that it's wrong and I can rule it out. I can rule things in and out really quickly. Um so that was a that was an observation that I made that you know we sort of feel that the younger generation are always taking over and I'm seeing now with AI that the older generation are able to add value um with their experience.

I agree and that's what I mean that don't believe everything you see or whatever the charge and I have an example when I started I used it testing I always try in the beginning those things to test and I want to make my own decisions about whatever is coming out first um and I I tested with a client and it was some information he's an aiologist so hearing aids um for people who's losing hearing and he prepares the hearing And I was doing a post about um famous people who have tinitus which is those click sounds on your ears.

Yeah.

And I got a barber stra was wearing a clear which is one of those implants that goes straight to your head.

Yeah.

I thought that doesn't [clears throat] sound right. I just there was something there.

And I investigated and investigated. It was nothing about it. Nothing. I was like, "Okay, Chuck GBT. " This was in the beginning. Now, again, we have to say it's changed a lot. It's developed a lot and there's a lot more trustworth. But when you're doing what I do for people, especially when I manage social media, I need to be them. It there cannot be any difference between me or them and you know people who follow them they need to feel they are following the same person or the base person writing is that person.

So I need to teach the AI their tone, their comments, the way they joke, the way they would express this and that is something I have to do and this is from me because I know my clients

that's not chippity is not going to give me that by just posting a social media showing them a post or a website I have to educate social um AI in that

that's very interesting. I love that too. I just love the blend of the human and the AI which you just brought so nicely in. And I'm a big proponent of that. We don't believe that AI can sweep people's jobs aside. I believe we can uh take some of the uh tedium out of work and also give more value to each employee.

And one example of that would be using tools like Claude and these other software development tools that are out like Copilot and so on.

Yeah. They say, you know, that you can get one person to do 10 times as much work. Well, that may be true. It may be not true, but still the important thing is that there was one person still there who now a lot more value. But when you look at a when I try to think about that as a project, all of a sudden I got a project where maybe half of the cost was in the coding.

Now it's a quarter of the cost because there's still the other components which are you know lead generation you know understanding the the [snorts] client's needs managing the client relationship that's all people it's still all people and that doesn't go away with AI

I mean the I give you an example in my personal uh experience which is every time I work with a client the first part is analyzing their business in social media not just their business but the competitor. So we need to find out and figure out the niche. How is it performing?

You know if there's a way to get through the gate I call it the open or halfopen door in which you know everything is there already but let's see if there's something that people are not exactly doing something different and that in the past would take me around two to three weeks because I would do it on my own. There's a lot of investigating, there's a lot of analyzing and then I would do the strategy which would take me around four to five days.

Now with AI and because I have been training my AI to how I do it, it takes me the an the analysis which is it used to be two or three weeks now it takes me four six hours.

Wow. Yeah. So

I am optimizing my time for my clients.

I would say to them, listen, the first month I'm not going to post because I have to do this job. Now I can start posting pretty much from the be from the beginning.

Yeah.

So that is also for them it's oh okay I'm already paying the month but this is already included which it was but it doesn't take that much time. And for me what it does is also it's easier but I can go further in a lot further in terms of information investigation. It's deeper

and also now I know how to find information. So again I trained my AI and now it's like oh I'm getting all this information. So it's even more information that I'm getting.

So for me this is one of the most amazing things I've I've I've achieved with AI. So, thank you.

Um, so Annie, so you're going from Anna to super Anna, is that right? Am I getting that?

Yeah. Yeah.

So, any tips for u for people obviously coming to you and getting your help and advice, but what are some tips we could give uh our audience about using AI for social media? The most important one for me is make sure that your question it's not a very broad question. So you have to give information also find which is the tool the right one for whatever it is you want to do.

So for example if you want to find information which a lot of people do use ChatGPT for random information like we would we've been using Google forever. So now they use charg to say okay so what does this mean or how do you do this that's fine

but you know you have other tools for that

but I'm going to give you another example I was talking to a friend and she had this business idea and she went to ChatGPT and she asked the business idea and she said to me I just have this feeling that ChatGPT is willing to agree with me with whatever it is and everything is going to be a good idea and I said well what did you ask did you asked, "Is this a good idea? " As simple as that.

And she said, "Well, yeah, more or less. " And I said, "Well,

you didn't give it any more information. It's a robot. It's not a person.

So, what should I do? " And I'm like, "Well, you need to give it information. What do you want? " Well, I wanted to know if it's a good idea. Do you want to know if it's a good idea of this business idea has potential as a business? It's very different,

right?

It's very different from the beginning. The question, okay, so what should I say?

So when you need to go and say okay um I have this business idea and I want to know how the potential it has how can I achieve it so on so that for me is the basic of AI make sure that whatever the question is it's not just about the question it's what you want to achieve from the answer

okay good good

okay so focus on what is it that you want to achieve

right right so focus on what you want to achieve um implied in there is perhaps some context.

You know that maybe when you're prompting you're giving some context about oh there's this

I might start one of mine with I've got a client that's got this problem they're in Australia I'm over here we're going to do automation blah blah and then continue on. So

yeah I think there's a little bit of effort needs in that. Um I was in Bahrain, this a quick segue in in Dubai uh with one of our mutual friends, Jatish and we found out I was reading the paper that they planned over the next 12 months to educate 1 million uh prompt engineers. They called them prompt engineers. So these are people that were would be trained on using ChatGPT and those types of tools.

Um they called it prompt engineering. I subsequently learned that a lot of that is really understanding the English language very well because these models are built on the English language. I mean maybe in future they'll be able to you know sort of bring the other languages in.

Um

but um yeah being able to express yourself in English and interpret well in English is was a key part of that. So although it sounds impressive to have a million people learning prompt engineering, a big slab of that was really just mastering language and language. Well,

I mean I use it mainly in Spanish and so far so good. I do use it in English for some clients.

But the truth is that I mean I agree and I think I'm becoming an engineer, a prompt engineer because preparing what I've been preparing for for all these analysis and a strategy that I was telling you about. I've took some prompts that I found somewhere and I made it my own. So I perfection those prompts for what I need

and again the outcome I'm looking for. So I'm very very very specific. I'm very yeah I could say exigent in what I'm what what I'm looking for.

But um but yes at the end of the day it's all about the prompt and context and language of course understanding and sometimes and I do have this you know lovehate relationship with it but I love it sometimes go who asked you for this? I didn't ask you for this. What is this?

I'm so sorry. And you know, you see people like, "Please could you give me" I said, "I'm not that polite with my AI. I just go, give me this. "

Yeah. I mean, there's a new emerging uh business um where people are creating prompts in a set of sequences that guides someone through, let's say you want to put together a marketing plan or a social media plan even where you would say, "Well, use this prompt.

Use this prompt. Use this prompt. " But there'll be obviously con contextual pieces that need to be added in by the client and then they go through and then they get the you know the AI to do all that work based on that that flow of the prompts. Have you tried anything like that?

Absolutely. That's exactly what I've done. So I took a sequence of prompts from someone. I actually copied them.

Screen screen copy Google take the text and I then use it on my first test for one client

and then what I've done is so I was using ChatGPT

at the same time I was uh using Google AI but studio core um I'm using the the programmers um application because I I like it a lot more

and then I was testing also the response how they were both of them each of them performing and and then what I did is once I had the results or accurate source uh results to what I wanted I went and I said okay now I want you from this information to give me a prompt

and create the prompt.

So I use the prompt to create the strategy and then once I had that now we create my own prompt because I already give you the input my personal look the way I work and now you're going to create a prompt for me.

Wow we we've gone beyond super Anna. We're now in the hyper Anna space I think.

Yes. All right. So any any other tips um that you that that we could give out to our you know our audience about tools to use? We talked about promp prompt engineering tal a lot about I guess ChatGPT. Maybe there's something else a little bit further away from that that you've been working on.

So I've been trying also image uh AI but when I start trying and testing these tools I go for free options. So I do that

before you engage with uh you know paying something just try and test whatever you need.

So I've been using a lot of that. Um but after testing charg I go more for Google AI in and again it all depends on what you're looking for

because I'm in I think it's more professional

the response I get from Google AI

than I get from Chad GPT. What I do like about church is that has that memory of what you've been doing.

So it already comes back to me saying would you like this same content in this tone and this other tone which I have given

but I'm looking I found a way with Google AI to do the same. It doesn't give me tones but it does help me not repeating everything constantly.

Also um we've talked about how important is to give context how important it is to make sure that the information you're getting from it is accurate but I also think in from my perspective from my experience in social media be careful not to copy post you need to be very careful of that and it's not that the algorithms can detect as people think this is a myth but it does I've seen post of people's that they did copy post straight away. They probably didn't read the whole thing and it said here is where you insert your link. So, you know, just just pay attention. Just pay attention and again investigate, study, test. Don't don't just go and, you know, go crazy with it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um Yeah. I think that's about it really. Just make sure you're doing the the right questions.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like Anna, you've really um been exploring AI and adapting to AI and keeping yourself in the loop and I think that's a shout out to you and just like any business person, they need to keep their eye on the frontier what's happening and AI is such a big thing. Let's answer the the question then for you. Is AI hype or help?

Help for sure. 100%. 100% help. I mean, yeah, it's it's actually been again mind-blowing. A huge help. So, of course, yes, I could have a community manager helping me and that is the idea and that's the plan.

But I also wanted to learn, again, this is another tip. Learn first, especially if you're going to use it in another in your business, learn yourself first and then delegate because if you don't know what's going on, you you cannot trust whatever this person, as you were saying, you know, maybe they're younger, they don't know, they don't have your knowledge. So, it's 100% health.

Yeah.

In every way.

Well, thank you, Anna. Before we wrap up, is there any questions or comments that you'd like to add?

No, I think we've covered everything pretty well in terms of, you know, AI and I think it's

Yeah, it's Yeah, we covered everything.

All right, Anna. Well, this is great.

We see each other each week, so I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Um, thank you so much for joining the podcast, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Thank you for having me. It was fun. Well, that was a great rundown of AI and social media with Anna. What we learned was how Anna uses it. Um, ChatGPT and Gemini and which ones she uses in different situations, the importance of prompting, the importance of context, and also we dabbled into some of these ways you can get templates to help you with your prompt engineering to help you go further with um your um use of the AI tools. Certainly, she talked about how it's improved her efficiency.

She can get work that would take weeks down to hours with certain tools that she use, and she can even go deeper in some cases. But she also alluded to how important it is to stay in the loop, to keep using your brain to um to keep on top of what AI is saying and making sure that everything that's created is authentic and you. And she even talked a little bit about how she stylizes things for her clients and for herself so that they are consistent. So, not letting AI get ahead of us, but staying very much in the loop. Well, if you want to get in touch with Anna, please follow the links in the description. If you want to get in touch with me or my team, please do so.

Also, the links in the description. If you could subscribe to the channel, that would really help us. And I hope that helps. And thanks for watching.