See this post below? Replace the words YouTube with Pinterest and show it to me within 2 minutes of each other. I’ll be suspicious, and you should be too. Are all the new AI accounts going to destroy social media? Probably.

The social in social media is on it’s way out and the robots are going to push us out the door. Meta announced they are going to begin setting up AI bot accounts to create content on their platforms. What does this mean to you? Is it already happening?

Earlier today I happened to be on Threads, a Meta-owned platform, and saw a post for someone who was advising followers to create a Pinterest post a week to boost business. The language was pretty specific and “salesy”. A few minutes later I saw almost the *exact* same language, only insert YouTube and video for the words Pinterest and Pin. Different user accounts. You can see the YouTube version of this post above. I omitted the user account, (it was different.) It was unclear if the account was legit or not. It had posts and interactions, but the language between the two was highly suspicious.

I will argue that it’s already happening. What does this mean for you? Well, Meta will tell your your ads reached much further than before, but I’ll tell you that bots do not buy a thing.

And that’s the real issue here. Companies are in this race to AI for things that none of us want. Yes, AI can help us write, it can help us do research but it removes the entire reason for being ON social media (the social part) and even further, as business owners, it degrades our use of the advertising reach of our social media accounts by marketing to (more) fake accounts. About a third of accounts by all reports are already fake profiles on some platforms. And we all have seen comment bots (both good and bad) on Meta platforms leading up to the election. Some are so good you might not know you’re arguing with a bot, but you are.

It’s not hard to see where this is going, and that it’s been announced means they’ve already done testing (I believe it, I’ve seen too many posts that are almost the same wording.)

Where do you go now? Well, customers will always resonate with real content (video), and you should produce more of it. If your business revolves around image search, try Pinterest (which is a visual search engine, not a social media platform.) You can still email people (it will go into their promotions tab, and that’s also a problem, but for another blog post.)

For our part, we are producing video for clients of ours, as well as for our own business. We are sharing content featuring our products and services that our clients are posting. Advertising? I think you’ll have to consider whether social advertising is worth it in the next 1-2 months. I believe the AI accounts are already here. I still believe that investing in ads targeted around specific searches will always be (somewhat) viable, but don’t believe the reach numbers, believe only the sales numbers and base your decisions accordingly.

Want more personalized help? Give me a ring, a text or an email.