Strategizing with Generative AI: Productivity Gains in Social Media Marketing

This study explores the use of ChatGPT for social media marketing and its potential impact on employment. We take stock of the literature on productivity gain and automation of work to unpack the role of AI in devising such strategies. To this end, we carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 social media professionals and a follow-up experiment using ChatGPT to generate social media marketing strategies for two companies. The results support the prospect of generative AI leading to increased productivity in the creation of strategies for social media as the experiments yielded high-quality output in terms of brand-fit, appropriate addressing of business challenges, and strategic flexibility. The results, however, also highlight the limitations in using off-the-shelf AI tools for marketing campaigns with intellectual property and data protection requirements. We conclude with an assessment of potential risks associated with data protection, the growing development of in-house AI tools by companies, and ethical considerations about the use of Generative AI.