How Your Beauty School Students Can Use AI To Build A Social Media Calendar

Unless you’ve been living off the grid, everyone has heard something of the buzz around Artificial Intelligence lately. While a lot of people assumed that AI would impact manual labor first, the launch of Chat GPT has had a larger impact on knowledge work with people in marketing, finance, education and administration seeing new applications for AI in their work almost daily.

So what does AI mean for future beauty professionals?

Because we are still early in the mass adoption of AI into every industry and profession, this is still a question with seemingly infinite possibilities. Places where AI is currently used in the beauty industry, or could be used in the near future include:

The biggest impact we believe AI can have for beauty school students and professionals today is in social media.

A Powerful Time Saver

Picture this: It’s been a long day, with back-to-back clients. You’re finally wrapping up and realize that you need to post something on social media. However, you feel mentally drained so creating stellar marketing content feels like a big ask right now. You decide you can try again tomorrow.

This is a common scenario for beauty professionals. Everyone can easily point to how impactful and important social media ends up being for building a book of business, but the truth is it can also be daunting and overwhelming.

That’s why we encourage schools to help students build their social media muscles while they’re still in school using a social media marketing curriculum like Beauty As A Business. Creating habits now, leads to muscle memory later, which increases the chances of success as a professional.

The scenario above happens a few weeks in a row and suddenly a professional can find themselves weeks or even months behind on keeping up with their social media marketing. From there it only feels harder to start up again. This is where AI comes in. The best way to avoid this situation is to have a plan. Before, it could take even the best social media posters a few hours to come up with a social media calendar for the month. With AI, this can be done in minutes. Here’s how:

First, you’ll need an account with Chat GPT.

Once you have your account, you’ll need to enter a prompt that will direct the AI to create what you need. Sometimes it’s better to break prompts into multiple steps, called prompt chaining, to get better outcomes.

Think of Chat GPT like your own personal social media consultant. You’ll first want to get some ideas that feel relevant to you. Here’s what your first prompt could look like:

“I am a (insert your program of study) student in (city, state) at (school name). I want to use social media to help me build a book of clients. What kinds of Instagram posts could I create to attract new clients?”

Feel free to add in any other particular details about your career goals or services that may be relevant. More information gives the AI more to work with.

Here is an example of an answer from Chat GPT using this prompt as an esthetics student:

Your next prompt could look something like this:

“​​Can you make me a social media calendar for one month that features these kinds of posts? There should be two posts per week. Every post needs a caption, emojis and hashtags. Please organize this into a table for me. Please organize each post in the table so it looks like a calendar.”

Again, feel free to add in additional requests or details you feel are important to your personal brand you are creating.

Here is an example of what Chat GPT could come up with for you:

This took less than a minute to generate. Here is the additional message Chat GPT sent with the creation of this social calendar:

Suddenly your entire month of social media posts are written, planned and you know exactly what photos or videos you need to capture to match them!

A critical note: You still need to go through and edit or tweak the posts created by AI because they won’t be perfect.

There may be some odd word choices or things that just feel off for exactly what you’re trying to create. But editing a social calendar that’s 80% done is much easier than starting from zero.

This is just the beginning of how AI can help beauty professionals save time and work less! Follow us on Instagram @beautyasabiz where we’ll keep you posted on more ways AI can be used by students to set them up for success in their future careers!