Using ChatGPT for social media posts: why they sound generic, and how to fix it

A general assistant knows nothing about your business unless you tell it, every time. With no context, it fills the gaps with the most typical post it can imagine: “Exciting news!”, a rocket emoji, “Elevate your…”, and a list of hashtags nobody follows. Your customers have seen that post a thousand times, and they scroll past it.

The fix isn’t a cleverer prompt. It’s giving the AI what a good copywriter would ask for before writing a word.

1. Tell it who you are, every time

Business name, what you sell, where you are, who your customers are and what you want the post to achieve. “Independent tackle shop in Birkenhead, carp and match anglers, we want people in the shop this weekend” beats “fishing shop”.

2. Give it your real details

Address, opening hours, prices and offers. Without them, the AI invents plausible ones or leaves gaps. Invented details are worse than gaps: a wrong price or opening time costs you trust.

3. Show it how you write

Paste three or four of your own posts or emails and ask it to match the tone, sentence length and phrases. “Pop in”, “cracking” and “the lads” say more about a local business than any adjective.

4. Feed it a real story

The posts people remember come from something that happened: a customer’s catch, a job that went wrong and got fixed, why you started. AI can’t invent that. Jot down two or three sentences of the real thing and let it shape them.

5. Write for each platform separately

An Instagram caption, an X post and a Google update need different lengths, hooks and hashtags. See our guide to character limits and hashtag rules.

6. Check every fact before you post

AI is confident even when it’s wrong. Read every post for prices, dates, claims (“best in the UK”, “guaranteed”) and anything that might break UK advertising rules, especially in health, finance or alcohol.

Doing all six every time is where the hours go. That’s why we built the Content Hub: it’s like ChatGPT, but personalised for your content. It remembers your business and brand profile, learns your voice from your own writing, interviews you for real stories, knows each platform’s rules, never invents reviews or prices, and can post to all your accounts at once.

It’s free to start with no sign-up, and it’s built and supported by wirral.ai in the North West.

The same principles apply wherever your team uses AI: give it real context, keep your own voice, and check what it produces. If you’d like your team to use AI confidently and safely across the business, our AI training is practical and built around your own tools and work. And if staff are already pasting company information into chatbots, read what the real exposure is.