Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
Good morning and welcome to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. I have my words all over the place today because we are being joined by the one, the only Mari Smith, premier Facebook marketing expert, AKA the queen of Facebook. Mari is joining us to talk about using AI in social media marketing and we are beside ourselves with joy. Welcome, Mari.
Mari
Oh, thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.
Esther
So, Mari, we met you years ago and you were, you know, the queen of Facebook. Even back then. How did you niche down into Facebook to start with?
Mari
I would say it just really. Facebook found me in the early 2000s. I was very involved in Internet marketing. One of the first people to do like eBooks and e -courses. And I had two loves and it was the Internet and relationships. And I had kind of a side career as a relationship coach and I had some information products around that. And then I was also in email marketing. Teach people how to write emails, how to get them opened, to put good calls to actions in. And it was called Email that Sizzles. And I remembered very, very clearly in around 2006, early 2007, a mentor of mine, I was at one of her masterminds and she's like, Mari, you can't keep doing this two lane thing. You got to pick fun. And I'm like, no, no, I love the Internet. I love people, you know, relationships in online world. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, this. I had heard a little bit about Facebook, but it just basically landed my lap. I had a friend that invited me to join it. A couple friends had. But then there was like this app where you could take and teach courses. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go and, you know, join this program, join the. The platform and then, and then go ahead and participate in this. Creating courses online specifically around Facebook. So I joined it. I was actually May 4, Star Wars Day, May the fourth of 2007. And all it was like all the angels were singing. I don't really feel like that about it now. It's like, you know, change days, right? For all of us.
Esther
Yeah.
Mari
But all of a sudden I was like, oh my God, this is my two loves fused together. It's the Internet people, is relationships in the online world. And so I just immediately got to task within the first few weeks of grabbing everybody I could and evangelizing. Are you on Facebook? Are you on Facebook? Let me show you how this was before ads before groups, before business pages, this was only the old fashioned profiles. This is before news feed. I mean it's just was the kind of like a glorified. Wasn't glorified like LinkedIn but obviously the main competitor at the time was MySpace. And I would just say to people, you know, my head hurt every time I went to MySpace. So this, you know Facebook is quite refreshing. And so yeah, it's not like I just decided to niche down. That's basically how it came about and I just fell in love with it, took it and ran with it.
Melanie
Well that was a while ago now and you have established yourself as the premier go to person for Facebook marketing. Very much the queen of Facebook. But so much has changed and where we are today, now we've got incredible capabilities, yes, using AI. Now a lot of us, so a lot of the listeners are established marketers or business marketers, you know the self employed business marketers. So they know that a lot of the tools they use already uses AI. But I don't think they understood the depth of the use of AI until chat GPT. So how can we as marketers, especially the smaller businesses employ AI properly in a marketing strategy today?
Mari
Melanie, I love that you use the word properly. I like to also say responsibly responsible AI use, transparent AI use, authentic AI use. It's deeply troubling me. Where we are right now is we're, you know, over two years in now of utilizing, utilizing of chat GPT, blasting onto the scenes and having everybody realize that there's this thing called generative AI which allows us to create, to iterate and to brainstorm and to have like this extension of ourselves, like a second brain if you will and to train it to get to know us and know our voices and of course meta. I'd be remiss if we didn't mention meta AI and people in various countries around the world. It's not necessarily rolled out in every single country yet, but people can just go to meta AI. But it's also baked into all of the meta apps, Facebook, Instagram, messenger and WhatsApp and also baked into the meta Ads manager. We can touch on that a little bit. But you know, at the top level, whatever your tool of choice, whether you're going to side by side compare meta AI to chat GPT, some people might like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, whatever your AI assistant, slash generative AI tool of choice is, there are certain approaches and strategies, use cases. So content creation, that's almost like a no brainer. So Coming up with, with good hooks. So let's say I would strongly recommend Reels, right? Reels are the thing on Facebook and certainly on Instagram. Excuse me. And it's, it's basically Meta's answer to the TikTok videos. And TikTok really made vertical short form, you know, 30, 60 seconds. They seem to all be growing in length. They're like competing for who can get, get longer. And I was like, wait, what happened to short form? But short form still very much works. And so let's say you're like, oh gosh, turn the camera on. You can just turn your phone on and record them that way. But you're like, okay, what are some of the pain points? What are some of my audience's challenges that, you know, I could really go deeper in and I could make these 30 second videos with. And you just kind of get stuck. You're looking at your blank screen. Well, hello. That's where a really brilliant use of, you know, kind of like top level use of for creating content in the first place is just putting in some good prompts and getting these tools to understand and know your audience. ChatGPT tends to do that really, really well. And you can say to it, you know, all right, I'm going to have you create, you know, 20 different hooks for 30 second Instagram Reels. Here's a bit about my audience, but I want you to first start by asking me like questions so that you understand what we're doing here and what my audience is and what my products and services are and you know, what good calls to actions would be. So it's not a matter of just putting in like a one or two line prompt into the AI tool and voila, it's going to create content for you that you can just copy and paste right away. Bottom line too. I know we can talk quite a bit about this and I'll, I'll stop in a minute, but I just wanted to say one more thing. I, I'm, I call. Well, I'm saying I call it. Somebody came up with the name of synthetic media. Synthetic media, it's basically anything that's created by AI. And so we're seeing an awful lot of images. And now more and more we're going to see video and video with, quote, real people going by in our feeds. And this is where it, oof, it really gets me in the stomach because I'm like, you need to, you need to put a disclaimer, you need to say, I used AI to create this. And you Know, to, to their credit, Meta does give you that option to put the we label on it. And, and actually if you create an image in Meta AI, it automatically puts a watermark on it. I think those things should be industry standard, right? Watermarks and labels. And so yeah.
Melanie
No, I couldn't agree with you more there. That's. There's far too much of the sort of impostering happening without our knowing. So-.
Esther
And it takes away the authenticity.
Melanie
Yeah,
Mari
yes, exactly. You know, yeah. It's funny because I've been saying that authenticity is making a comeback because beginning of our chat here I was talking about like early days of social media, authenticity was all. And then it's like, wait a minute, authenticity has shown me what you had for breakfast. I really don't care. And so the word got kind of diluted, right? But now it's like, oh, that's the antidote to synthetic media. Is this authentic real people? The three of us are right here live, real time, recording this, this video, audio and there's no clones here, I don't think. Anyway, this is the real, no.
Esther
It's the real me as well.
Melanie
So Mari, just a quick follow up question to, to that particular topic and I'm glad you actually segued onto it was about the intelligence of AI and using it for ads and, and entrusting it to find your audience, select the topics that they're interested in, right down to locations, genders. Are we becoming slightly too reliant on AI? Are we, are we giving it too much power when it comes to managing our marketing or is it really the best way?
Mari
I have to give you kind of a qualified answer to that because actually was recently speaking directly with Meta. I work with some of their ads teams and they're really on a mission to get more and more businesses and marketers and advertisers to understand the power of what's already baked into to the Meta Ads Manager. And so for example, one of my favourite things is some of the things we're just talking about that you can do with chat, GBT and Meta AI and so forth is like headline generation. So you can just give a couple of keywords and right inside of Ads Manager you're going to write your ad and you're telling it a couple things of what you're going to talk about or what the ads about. And it will instantaneously, it's going to give you a whole bunch of other options and that's for the line for the primary text. And then when it comes to the images now I, I like that Meta has done this so far, we'll see as of time of this recording so far, you cannot actually generate a fresh image right inside of Meta Ads Manager. So even though they could flip a switch, I'm sure, and they just bring their image generator right into Ads Manager.
What you can do though is you can enhance your, your own image, right? You can upload an image. So it works really well for product based businesses. Let's say you've got this beautiful, you know, faux leather or suede or whatever, sofa sectional and you, and then you can just tap the button and Meta will give it to you in all kinds of different backgrounds or you know, whatever your product is, you can have different backgrounds. Then you can add a little bit animation if you wanted to. So I think those things are great. But to the very point that you just made a second go, Melanie, it's about, you know, we over reliant and about utilizing the AI power powered tools to basically find our audiences. That's called the, the Advantage plus audience. Anytime you see the advantage of the we plus sign after it, that's, that's Meta's AI aspects of every Ads Manager. So there's the creative side, there's the placement. I think the placements is fine. Yeah, they know you know better than us probably of where the best placements are and of course it goes by inventory, what's available. But the part that I think the jury's out still for a lot of advertisers is can we totally hands off the steering wheel and trust that Meta is really, truly going to find our ideal audience? And I've spoken in my Social Scoop Facebook group with, you know, thousands of social media professionals about this very feature. Some of them are like, oh my God, it's amazing. I got an improvement in my ROAS return on ad spend, of course. And others are like, oh, it was dreadful, it got the wrong people. And I was like, whoa, okay, this thing is maybe not ready for prime time. So I think in summary that yes, keep dabbling, keep testing, put nominal budgets onto seeing how far you can go down the rabbit hole with trusting the AI aspect of the ad, especially because you're investing your money, but keep a very close eye on your metrics of how it's performing and targeting and whatnot.
Esther
Yeah, you brought up a good point there about, you know, you type in a couple of words and the Meta AI will generate the rest of it. Does that open us up to repetitive like all the ads looking the same, sounding the same and again going back to the authenticity. Is there a way to, you know, avoid looking and sounding like everybody else while still using the AI and it helping you to generate the best type of ad and the best, you know, text around the ad, but without sounding like your competitor?
Mari
Yeah, that's a really good one, Esther. I think the bottom line is just, please don't ever just go 100% verbatim with what the system is recommending because there is a, there is a really excellent, There is definitely a possibility that the keywords that it draws from for you and your niche are very, very similar to a competitor. And so that's where it's so important for you to have like your own brand guidelines, your own already pre written out, probably not necessarily used AI, but maybe enhanced with AI in terms of your, your messaging, your voice, the keywords you use, the kinds of, the tonality of it, and it obviously goes without saying things like, like fonts and colors and all that. So you're not just going to have yourself all over the place. But yeah, sounding like competitors. It's interesting when you look at chat, GBT in particular, I have noticed that coming up with content, which I, I don't personally do much of that come up, I use, I use AI, these AI tools for ideation, not necessarily coming up with verbatim content, but I have noticed that it tends to pick certain keywords. Right. Unlock, unlock the secrets. Like, okay, everybody's talking about everyone. It's like, I guess that's a-.
Esther
Leveraging.
Mari
Yeah, there you go. Leverage. Right, Right, exactly. So if we're, if we're paying close enough attention to like what other marketers are doing, and one also antidote too to all of this is to just pay, make it a point to consume other people's ads and keep an eye on your competitors. And you know, many, many years ago, I think that was one of the greatest new features that Facebook brought out was the ability to go and see public facing what, what everybody is placing with their ads. You can, you can check anybody's ads and not all the details, but certainly you can see the, the copy, the media, the headline and all that. So. Yeah.
Melanie
Yeah, okay, so. And you keep on, you're so good at this segueing lark. It's really funny you think she's done this before. So one of the things that you, you brought up was about the audience and how it's being selected by the AI. But you can't actually see through the metrics, how they picked those people, what pages they liked, you know, what interests they Shared. Well, you've pretty much got in, in the analytics is the top level stuff. So how can we learn from AI what they found, worked or not if they don't tell us that information?
Mari
Yeah, they're entraining us to entrust them. They're, they're absolutely indoctrinating us to, to keep those hands off the steering wheel. They want us to just rely on doing the machine learning and the, the one what was coming to me as you were asking that question there, Melanie, you will be able to tell by the conversions. So who's actually signing up, who's joining your email list, who's purchasing your products or services and, and starting to see, you know, whatever data you can collect on the first party. Excuse me. To be able to say, oh my gosh, you know, I thought my average age was like, you know, 40 to 55 females in a certain part of the US and like, wow, oh my gosh, look at this. I've got this whole demographic over here, the 30 to 35 males in Australia. I don't. Just making it up, but, but it's like, oh my gosh, they're, look at that. They're actually signing up for my program. Okay. I hadn't even thought that they would be necessarily a target. I have no idea. I just pulled that out of thin air as a random, you know, really opposite example. But yeah, it's a very same technology that they use for the lookalike audiences, which we've had for years. Right. You upload your audit, hey, here's my best customers. Could you go find me more? More people like this. They'll never disclose what algorithm creates the lookalikes.
Melanie
I was kind of hoping you'd tell us.
Mari
Yeah, hang on, I'll get Zack on the phone here.
Esther
Well, using AI in social media marketing, we've talked about, you know, the using it as in ads. And obviously when you place an ad, it's because you want to grow, you want to sell or you want to get more people, more eyes on your products and services. But how else can we use AI to encourage growth in our social media marketing?
Mari
Yeah, certainly chatbots is one aspect right now, to my knowledge, Meta's inbuilt Chatbot is, you know, and you can, that's where people DM you on their Facebook page or an Instagram and you have an automated response. And then more sophisticated, you can start getting into dialog with them. And those are right now pretty much by third parties, you know, manychats, one of the most popular or customers AI. My Friend Larry started that company. But what's coming on the AI front, we'll see. You know, as of time of this recording doesn't exist yet, but it's very much in the works. I know Zuckerberg and team are really working hard on what they're going to be calling the full on, you know, meta AI assistant. And so that you can train it on your entire knowledge base, FAQs, customer service and deploy that inside of your messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and threads. Probably to be able to do pre and during and post sales service support. So helping people make buying decisions and then directing them to where they can buy, then following up with them. A lot of that can be automated. My deep concern, you know, I wrote the book on relationship marketing a long Time ago now, 2011, that came out and that's so close to my heart. It's like we have to treat people like people. Do not go too crazy with your over automation and AI. AI-ifying. There is another use case of AI in groups like the AI or what do they call the admin assist and that that's kind of AI powered to make sure that you're getting, you know, the right people into the groups. You can do like automated invites. So everybody that likes or comments on your Facebook page, they got automatic invite to join your group. Then what else was I going to say? Oh, then, there's some pushback about this use of AIs inside of Facebook groups. Not everybody has it yet. So again, this will be something that's coming and from what I've seen and heard of the folks that have chosen to enable it in their group, it can go totally rogue. It can, it can, like because it's supposed to. The idea is it's finding answers to questions based on past posts. So but that doesn't necessarily answer your question about growth. But it could. Like if a group is really, really well run, people are getting their questions answered, they're more likely to tell their friends and, and Facebook's more likely to recommend the group too. And a really active group.
Esther
All of that that's coming in, is it going to make it easier for businesses to market or is it going to take away, you know, the whole AI is taking my job. Is it going to detract from marketing and just, you know, well, the bot can do it, the AI can do it. So why do I need to hire somebody?
Mari
I think there is a lot of that. There is a lot of that. Why do I need to hire someone? I'm seeing even like yesterday I watched a webinar that which was really aimed at the enterprise corporate level. I like to keep my, my fingers in a lot of pies. So it's like my audience tends to be small, small to medium enterprise business. But also I've worked with numerous major brands too. So you know, I keep, keep my, my finger in the pulse and there's definitely a combination of like the over automation or not over but like integrating automation and AI and generative AI and AI for customers, customer support. But at any given second along the whole sequence or journey experience of the customer is like they could just like raise their hand or press a button, go, hey, I'm human. This, this thing is doing my head and it's me round in circles. It's gonna be the wrong answer. It's like, you know, and or is keep offering me this product that I already bought it or whatever this situation and at any given moment there's a, there's a human there at the same time. Yeah. I think for content creation. Ooh I do, I do feel for some, some folks jobs and then eventually strategy. You know what's, what's the guy's OpenAI. Founder of OpenAI.
Melanie
I can't remember.
Mari
My brain just went flat out. Oh well, we'll insert his name here. I know who it is, my mind's eye. But he's absolutely declared in the last maybe 12 months or something that within five years all the things, the strategy, the you know like agencies, you name it is all going to be able to be outsourced to these agents. Sam Altman. Sam Altman. Just what's bothering me, I couldn't, I'm sorry Sam, your name wasn't top of mind this morning. He's a genius. But you know, I don't know. These big tech companies are sure duking it out to jockey for position to be the top AI companies.
Esther
Yeah.
Melanie
So I've got to ask, you mentioned manychats, which immediately made me think, ah, website integrated. Then we've got Pixels which are website integrated products. Do you think there's going to be other products, other integrations that's going to come about from Meta in different forms?
Mari
You know I loved their chat integration so. And I would put it on all my sales pages and my courses and it would help with conversions because you've got this little bubble, this pop up chat bubble in the bottom right of your screen and they over the years it was that you had to be logged into Facebook to be able to chat and it initiates a messenger chat inside of your, your business page messenger. Then they change it where anybody could, like you could, you could, you didn't have to have a login. So like anonymously chat, chatting and then all of a sudden out of the blue disappeared it vanish. They just cut it off. And, and I honestly at this stage I'm not quite sure. My best educated guest, I guess is because of what I mentioned a little bit a minute ago is about this Meta AI assistant coming. And I would imagine that that is going to have a fee. They've done an awful lot so far for free with Meta AI. And of course, not to mention they've got this whole other revenue stream for the be meta verified which started at like US$15 a month per Facebook, per Instagram account. And then all of a sudden and you know, within the last, you know, whatever, certainly within the last year, six months, whatever, they introduced these crazy high levels, like 500amonth. And I'm like, who is, is there anybody out there paying that? So my point, I'm segueing all over the place here to like the financial aspect. So yes, we're going to have, have a lot more AI integrations was the word you use, Melanie, for the website, I would think, and into our pages, certainly also into Meta Business Suite because my prediction is we're just going to be able to go to Meta Business Suite, press a few buttons, poof. It makes the content, it schedules the content, it creates the videos. I mean they've got that Gen movie. Gen movie, Gen AI. Oh my God, that is so sophisticated. It's, it's, you know, you've got OpenAI Sora for making movies and now what? Zuckerberg is a trillion dollar company, right? Zuckerberg, you know, Matt has a trillion dollar company. They got so much money, they, they're absolutely going to be one of the biggest players in all things AI. Not just social media, not all things, but yeah. So, you know, being able to make these videos and maybe, I don't know. Look out Hollywood.
Melanie
Wow, it's futurist Mari Smith myth.
Mari
Yeah, well, we gotta stay grounded in the now and coming back to that authentic human to human connection. And don't go too crazy with your overuse of AI. There's a lot of early adopters, many of whom are my peers in this industry. I'm, I'm hanging back. You know, I call myself an early adopter, but I will never be the first in line because I'm such an investigator and I'm such an experimenter and I go deep down the Rabbit holes. And I test and iterate, then I come out and go, okay, this is what I'm doing. And I haven't reached that point yet. It's been two years of chat GPT and I'm still like, okay.
Esther
We're still dipping our toes in the water, but like you said, there's just so much to it and there's so many different avenues that we can go down with AI. It's such a huge topic and we've literally only scraped the surface today. But we're very aware, Mari, that your time is precious and we're so thankful to have you here with us today. How can people learn more about the one and only Mari Smith?
Mari
Oh, well, certainly on social media, Facebook. And then if you go to my Facebook page, which is just Mari Smith, then you'll find my group, which is Social Scoop. Excuse me, the Mari Smith Social Scoop group. And that's my 25, 26,000 members and tremendous source of social media news and support and peer support and access to me. So that's a good place. Otherwise, any of my socials are marismith.com or just google me. Or wait, ChatGPT has its new search, so maybe just ChatGPT me. It doesn't. Doesn't roll off the tongue as well as Google me, does it?
Melanie
Doesn't. No.
Esther
No.
Melanie
Well, you could contact us because, you know, we have an in now.
Mari
Yeah, there you go. Reach out to Melanie and Esther. Be my. My gatekeepers.
Melanie
Oh, we're so honoured to have you here. Thank you for giving us your time. We are aware that you've. You've got a busy day ahead, so we will let you go. But you heard it here first, guys. There is a lot coming up that is, you know, hopefully going to be integrated into maybe our websites, into our social channels, and you need to keep an eye on Mari Smith. Well, that's all the time we have for. For now, but we'll be back again with another podcast next week. Have a great week.
Esther
Bye.
Melanie
Bye.
So, Esther, that was quite a coup, wasn't it? Mari Smith.
Esther
Yeah, quite a coup.
Melanie
Bit of a coup having you.
Mari
Well, I know you mean C O U P, but, you know, in Scotland, a coup is a cow.
Esther
I know. We don't mean that version.
Mari
I know, I know. I just. That's where my mind went. I'm like, what'd you say? Oh, cool.
Melanie
Oh, my God.
Mari
It's a good blooper, because I'm from Scotland.
