What’s Cooking? How to Create Social Media Content with AI

You know the questions your customers ask, the work your team is proud of, and the services you want people to understand. Turning that knowledge into useful social media content takes preparation and a repeatable process.

Ratatouille gives us a useful kitchen analogy: equipment alone does not produce a good meal. You need ingredients, direction, and someone willing to taste before serving.

This guide explains how to create social media content with AI, from a spoken brief to an approved, scheduled post. You direct the work; an AI assistant helps coordinate the tools that produce it.

By the end, you will have a process for preparing your brand assets, choosing production tools, reviewing one sample, planning a month of content, and calculating the cost of each approved post. Start with one complete example before preparing the whole month’s menu.

If you are still deciding what needs to change, start with Is Your Social Media Stuck in Groundhog Day?.

1. Talk to your AI: Create the social media brief

In my experience, speaking makes it easier to keep an idea moving. I can explain the background, explore a different direction, and add the details I might leave out if I were typing a short prompt.

That extra context matters. A useful conversation includes:

• Who you want to reach.
• What customers need to understand.
• What makes your business relevant to them.
• Examples of the work or approach you have in mind.
• What you want someone to do after seeing the post.

You do not need a perfectly rehearsed brief. Talk through the idea, then ask the assistant to organise the discussion into an audience, message, format, and next step. Review that summary before production begins.

Voice is my preferred starting point; written notes remain useful for exact names, prices, claims, and corrections.

Related reading: Why AI Is Failing in Your Organization.

2. Connect your AI to your working files and tools

Think of your computer as the workshop where the materials and production tools live.

If the handoffs are the sticking point, start with connecting the steps into a working process.

A suitably configured assistant can work with approved folders and run local tools. OpenAI documents these capabilities for Codex: reading, changing, and running code in a selected working directory. Its local execution documentation explains how commands are carried out on the local machine. Codex documentation, local execution documentation.

Installing a desktop chat app alone does not provide all these capabilities. The practical benefit comes from the files, tools, permissions, and integrations available to the assistant. A browser-based workflow may also offer useful connected tools.

For social media production, the workshop might contain your brand assets, source photos, approved scripts, and editing software. With the appropriate setup, local tools can process assets and assemble finished files. Cloud services may still perform the voice or video generation.

Choose a dedicated project folder so that inputs, drafts, and approved exports are easy to distinguish. Test one simple action before assuming the whole workflow is connected.

3. Stock your kitchen: Prepare your brand assets and expertise

Prepare a small reference pack:

• Brand kit: logo files, colours, fonts, and visual guidelines.
• Business facts: services, locations, offers, contact details, and relevant limitations.
• E-E-A-T material: evidence of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, such as real projects, relevant qualifications, and approved testimonials.
• Customer knowledge: common questions, objections, and reasons people choose you.
• Creative samples: previous posts, templates, or new concepts showing a direction you like.

Our approach to building content from your expertise explains how to keep sources, review and reuse connected.

Your experience is part of the source material. As I put it when discussing business visibility:

“You’re the one that’s going to need to beat your own drum, as a business.”

Explain the work behind your claims. That gives the assistant substance to communicate and gives customers something they can evaluate.

Explain why you like each sample. Is it the opening, pacing, humour, framing, or clarity? An example becomes much more useful when the assistant understands what to learn from it.

Keep your business facts dependable while allowing the creative approach to evolve. A brand guide should still leave room to test something different when the current style is not working.

4. Research social media hooks with Meta and TikTok

Two starting points are:

• Meta Ad Library: study ads running on Facebook and Instagram for ideas about openings, visuals, offers, and calls to action. An active ad is not proof of successful performance. Meta Ad Library.
• TikTok Creative Center: explore its selected Top Ads for inspiration. The examples can suggest formats to test, but their results do not guarantee your own. TikTok’s Top Ads overview.

A paid creative research service is another option if it saves you useful research time. Before choosing one, check which platforms it covers, what its performance indicators actually measure, and whether it connects to your assistant or requires manual use.

Collect a few references and describe what you want to explore. Adapt the underlying idea to your own business rather than reproducing another brand’s wording or creative assets.

5. Choose AI tools for video, voice, and avatars

You do not need every tool for every post. These are possible roles in the workflow, not a verified promise that every service connects directly to every assistant.

Sources: OpenArt video generation, ElevenLabs text-to-speech, HeyGen.

Use your own voice and likeness, or material you have permission to use. Keep generated illustrative scenes distinct from evidence of real customer work.

For each service, establish whether the assistant can use an integration, an API, or an approved browser workflow. If a step requires you to upload or download something manually, include that handoff in the process and cost.

6. Taste one before making thirty: Build your content calendar

Choose a real customer question. Agree on the answer, the opening, the format, and the next step before spending generation credits.

For a short FAQ video, the sequence could be:

1. Review the script for accuracy and clarity.
2. Choose real footage, generated illustration, or an avatar presenter.
3. Generate or record the narration.
4. Assemble the video and captions.
5. Review pronunciation, visuals, text, and the call to action.
6. Save an approved version.

Once that example works, build a thirty-day plan containing FAQs, demonstrations, project stories, team introductions, and relevant offers. Give each post a reference number, audience, purpose, format, platform, and review status.

Approve a few representative samples before producing the full batch. This helps catch an unsuitable style before it becomes an expensive month of unsuitable content.

7. Adapt and schedule posts for each social platform

One idea can produce several versions. Check each destination’s current requirements and review the aspect ratio, framing, captions, length, and call to action. Cropping a video can accidentally remove the most important detail.

For help defining production, publishing and response responsibilities, see our AI social media services.

A connected scheduling tool can provide one calendar for the approved content. Postoria is one scheduling option with an assistant connection for listing accounts, uploading media and scheduling posts. Connect the intended social accounts and test the required formats before relying on the workflow.

The intended experience is conversational: selecting an approved post, choosing LinkedIn or TikTok, and specifying when it should go out. That depends on the scheduler supporting the account, format, and connection being used.

Before submitting a scheduled post, review:

• The exact account and platform.
• The approved media file and caption.
• The destination link, if any.
• The date, time, and time zone.

After submission, check the scheduler’s confirmation and calendar entry. An assistant saying a post is scheduled should correspond to an actual scheduled item.

An organic post and a paid ad are different deliverables. Paid distribution adds campaign settings, budget, targeting, and a separate approval step.

8. Cost per serving: Budget for AI social media production

This workflow is not free, and a basic AI subscription should not be treated as the entire production budget.

Count subscriptions, API usage where applicable, generation credits or minutes, retries, scheduling, setup, and human review. Subscription usage and API billing may be separate. Tokens alone do not capture the cost of the workflow.

Here is an illustrative calculation—not vendor pricing, an agency quote, or evidence of typical savings:

If initial setup took another four hours at the same rate, the first month would total $770, or about $25.67 per approved video. Replace every assumption with your actual usage and time.

Compare that figure with a real quote for equivalent work: the same video lengths, formats, scripting, revisions, scheduling, and reporting. Potential savings are worth investigating, but their size needs to be demonstrated. Original filming and extensive creative strategy can materially change the comparison.

Related reading: A $20 AI Plan Is Not AI Integration.

9. Listen to the diners: Measure results and improve

Review useful signals: watch time, relevant engagement, website visits, inquiries, and bookings where you can track them.

My approach to testing comes back to this:

“You don’t want to post the same thing over and over again and not get a result.”

Discuss what the results suggest, then choose a specific change to test. That could be the opening, format, subject, or offer. Avoid assuming a creative change caused a result when the audience, budget, or distribution also changed.

Your assistant can help organise the work and the evidence. You still decide what the business should say and whether the results justify continuing.

The aim is a process that becomes more useful with each cycle. Prepare the ingredients, review what leaves the kitchen, and let the response influence the next batch.

Let’s make the first one together

Bring your brand materials and one customer question. We can help you build and test the first complete workflow.

Written from Stephen Lau’s experience and point of view, with AI-assisted research and editorial production.