Podcast Summary: AI Explored – “Using AI-Inspired Social Content to Grow a Loyal Audience”
Podcast Information:
- Title: AI Explored
- Host: Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner – AI Marketing
- Episode: Using AI-Inspired Social Content to Grow a Loyal Audience
- Release Date: June 10, 2025
- Description: This podcast caters to marketers, creators, and business owners eager to harness AI’s potential. Hosted by Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, the show delves into practical and actionable AI strategies for business growth.
Introduction
Michael Stelzner opens the episode by addressing the overwhelming pace of AI advancements and emphasizes the importance of community support in navigating these changes. He introduces the AI Business Society, highlighting its role in fostering a collaborative environment for marketers to share insights and overcome challenges together.
“The marketers who are truly thriving today with AI have discovered something really important. They're not doing it alone.” [00:00]
Introduction to Sabrina Romanov
Michael welcomes Sabrina Romanov, an AI educator and founder of Blotato, an AI-driven social content tool. Sabrina shares her impressive journey over the past year, growing her social media following from scratch to over 700,000 followers across various platforms, and launching her second software company with the help of AI.
“I started making AI education content a year ago just to help teach everyday people, like, here's how to use ChatGPT to be a little more productive.” [06:37]
Sabrina’s Journey into AI
Sabrina delves into her background, explaining how her passion for AI began during her studies in computer science and physics at UC Berkeley. She recounts her early ventures into AI, particularly in natural language processing and speech recognition for sales and customer support, which led to the successful sale of her first company to Pegasystems.
“In 2013 I already felt I was late to the game, but that's how I got into it.” [02:51]
Transition to AI Education and Content Creation
After selling her first company, Sabrina experienced burnout but found a renewed purpose in AI education. She identified a significant gap between advanced AI adoption in Silicon Valley and everyday usage elsewhere. This realization drove her to create educational content aimed at simplifying AI for the masses, leveraging platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Substack to reach a broad audience.
“I have grown from zero to I think 750,000 followers now in just a year.” [06:37]
Strategies for Growing a Social Media Following with AI
1. Content Platform Strategy:
- Initial Platforms: Sabrina started with daily posts on LinkedIn for two months.
- Expansion: Incorporated TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, a newsletter on Substack, and other platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
- Adaptation: Shifted from technical content to beginner-level content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which significantly boosted her following.
“When I started doing TikTok and started making beginner level content, that's when things really took off.” [07:35]
2. Importance of Volume and Consistency:
- Sabrina emphasizes the need for high volume and consistency in content creation, especially on platforms like TikTok and Twitter, which favor frequent posting without penalizing users for excessive content.
“Post often, as often as you can honestly stick to the platforms that don't punish posting often so you can get feedback really, really quickly.” [34:34]
Time Savings and Efficiency with AI
Sabrina highlights significant time savings achieved through AI, reducing her content creation workload from approximately 30 hours a week to just 10 hours. These savings primarily stem from:
- Research and Ideation: Utilizing AI for brainstorming, researching customer pain points, and generating content drafts.
- Content Repurposing: Leveraging Blotato to transform existing content (e.g., YouTube videos, TikTok clips) into posts for other platforms.
- Publishing Automation: Streamlining the scheduling and distribution of content across multiple platforms using AI tools.
“Now I make content in only one and a half days a week, so about 10 hours a week.” [12:00]
Introduction to Blotato
Blotato is Sabrina’s AI-powered social media management tool designed to replicate the functionalities of platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer, with enhanced AI-driven writing assistance. Key features include:
- Content Repurposing: Automatically transforms existing content into new posts tailored for different platforms.
- AI Writing Assistant: Generates drafts based on Sabrina’s unique voice and previous content.
- Scheduling: Facilitates bulk scheduling of posts across multiple social media channels.
- AI Image and Video Generation: Creates visual content to complement posts, essential for increasing engagement on platforms dominated by visual media.
“Blotato essentially uses sources...then runs it through an AI writing assistant trained on your posts, on your voice, and then spits out drafts for all of the platforms.” [39:01]
Best Practices for Using AI in Social Content Creation
1. Setting Realistic Expectations:
- Sabrina cautions against viewing AI as a magic solution for instant virality. Instead, AI should be used as a tool to enhance and scale content creation without compromising quality.
“Don’t overthink it. Use AI as honestly like a way 10x better Google search to help you like research ideas.” [14:09]
2. Maintaining Control and Authenticity:
- Emphasizes the importance of the creator’s voice and perspective. AI should assist, not replace, the human element in content creation.
“You are still in control. You need to have some kind of viewpoint or perspective that you are trying to share and then use ChatGPT to help you create content around that.” [15:22]
3. Leveraging AI for Research and Insights:
- Utilizing AI to analyze comments and interactions to derive content ideas. Public platforms like Reddit and Quora can be excellent sources for understanding audience pain points and interests.
“You could take your best posts, use AI to analyze the best comments there...and that can be a seed for new posts that are coming up.” [16:16]
Custom GPTs for Personalized Content Creation
Sabrina discusses the benefits of creating custom GPT models tailored to one’s unique voice and business context. These models can generate content that aligns closely with the creator’s style and objectives.
Steps to Create a Custom GPT:
- Gather Content: Compile previous posts, articles, and any written material that reflects your voice.
- Train the Model: Use platforms like ChatGPT to create a custom GPT by feeding it your curated content.
- Generate Content: Utilize the trained GPT to draft new posts, ensuring they maintain consistency with your established voice.
“If you're a personal brand, a lot of your posts, you can feed them into the custom GPT to train it on your voice, your business, your style of writing, speaking.” [28:20]
Blotato in Action
Sabrina shares real-world applications of Blotato, illustrating how the tool has enabled her to repurpose content efficiently and maintain a consistent posting schedule across multiple platforms. She highlights a specific instance where Blotato generated a faceless video that reached 30 million views, showcasing the tool’s capability in creating highly engaging visual content.
“Blotato can take your post’s Content, generate a video scene by scene based on the content of your post, and then you can post that along with your post.” [39:36]
Privacy and Ethical Considerations
Addressing concerns around AI’s role in recording and analyzing meetings, Sabrina advises transparency and adherence to existing ecosystem tools (e.g., Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini) to ensure privacy compliance. She stresses the importance of obtaining consent when using AI to capture and repurpose interactions involving clients and partners.
“Just be upfront about it...some people would say, oh, that's a great idea. Can I use it for my social media posts too?” [22:16]
Documentation and Content Creation Process
Sabrina emphasizes the importance of documenting daily business activities and leveraging AI to convert these records into engaging social media content. By using tools like custom GPTs, she extracts key takeaways from meetings and interactions, transforming them into valuable posts that resonate with her audience.
“AI can help you document what it is you're doing every day in your business...and then like have AI every week send you a summary of like, these were the top five most interesting takeaways from the meetings that you had this past week.” [21:00]
Building Blotato: A Case Study
Sabrina recounts the development journey of Blotato, highlighting her use of AI in coding and iterating the software based on community feedback. By documenting her process on YouTube, she demonstrated the feasibility of building a software tool from scratch using AI, inspiring others to undertake similar projects.
“I built the first version of Blotato, actually 100% with AI. And I filled myself. So it's my YouTube playlist called Build SaaS with AI.” [40:34]
Conclusion
In conclusion, Sabrina Romanov offers a compelling case for leveraging AI to scale social media content creation without sacrificing quality or personal authenticity. Tools like Blotato exemplify how AI can streamline workflows, repurpose existing content, and generate new post ideas, allowing creators to focus on engaging with their audience and expanding their reach.
Final Thoughts from Michael Stelzner: Michael reiterates the key takeaways:
- Don’t Overthink It: Utilize AI as a supportive tool while maintaining creative control.
- Stay Active and Engaged: Avoid producing low-effort content; ensure each post has substance.
- Use AI for Insights: Leverage AI to derive valuable content ideas from interactions and feedback.
“You are very much in control. Don't expect AI to just like write whatever and you go along with it and go viral. It just doesn't work that way.” [15:22]
Connect with Sabrina Romanov:
- Website: blotato.com
- Newsletter & Videos: Substack
- Social Media: Search for Sabrina Romanov with the mushroom emoji on TikTok and Instagram.
This episode provides a comprehensive exploration of how AI tools can revolutionize social media content creation, offering practical strategies and real-world examples to help marketers, creators, and business owners grow a loyal audience efficiently and authentically.
