How to use AI for social media posts without sounding like a bot

AI writing tools are good at the part of social media many people put off: the empty caption box. Ask for a post and you get one in seconds, hashtags included.

The catch is what comes back from a vague request. It is a caption that could belong to any business in your category, and your followers have probably scrolled past hundreds like it.

You do not have to stop using AI to fix this. You type less, and you spend that time on the brief and the edit instead.

Write a brief, not a topic

What you type first decides most of what you get back. A topic gives the model nothing to go on, so it fills the gaps with the most average sentence it knows.

Here are two requests for the same post at a small bakery:

Write a post about our new sourdough.

Write an Instagram caption for our new rye sourdough. It comes out of the oven at 7am on Saturdays only, and we bake 30 loaves. It is for regulars who already buy our white sourdough. Ask them to reserve a loaf by DM before Friday night.

The second request takes a minute longer to type and usually saves several rounds of rewriting. It answers what the model cannot guess: what exactly you are selling, who it is for, what people should do next, and where the post will run.

The AI Assistant in eksis gives the same advice under its prompt box: include the key points, who the post is for, and what you want people to do.

Improve one draft instead of picking from ten

A common habit is to ask for ten versions and pick the best one. In practice you pick the least bad, and all ten share the same weaknesses because they came from the same request.

Keeping one draft and fixing it in small steps works better. Make it shorter. Make it more casual. Move the reservation line to the top. Each change builds on the last, so you can see what every step did and stop as soon as the post reads right.

The eksis composer works this way. You describe the post, press Generate, and get a single draft. The buttons under it (Rephrase, Shorten, Expand, More casual, More formal) rewrite whatever draft is on screen, so their effects stack: press Shorten twice, then More casual, and you have a short, relaxed version of the same post. When it is close, insert it and finish the last few words by hand.

Add the detail only you know

A model knows what bakeries usually say. It does not know that the rye recipe came from the owner's grandmother, that one regular has asked for it every week since spring, or that the first test batch came out flat.

Details like these make a post sound like a person wrote it, and they are usually what people reply to. Before you schedule a post, add at least one sentence the AI could not have written: a name, a time, a small thing that went wrong, a question customers keep asking.

If you cannot think of one, take that as a signal. Maybe the post does not need to go out this week.

Cut the phrases that give it away

Some phrases turn up far more often in machine-written text than in anything people write by hand. Readers may not be able to name them, but the pattern is easy to recognize once you have seen enough of it. Read the draft once looking only for these:

• Openers that announce instead of saying something, like "In today's fast-paced world" or "Let's dive in".
• Inflated verbs: unlock, elevate, empower, supercharge.
• Adjectives that could describe anything, stacked in threes: "fresh, flavorful, and unforgettable".
• The "it's not just a loaf, it's an experience" construction.
• An emoji at the start of every line.
• A closing question nobody will answer, such as "What's your favorite bread? Tell us below!"

Then read the caption out loud. If you would not say it to a customer standing at your counter, rewrite the sentence until you would.

Shape the post for each platform

The same announcement needs a different shape on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Threads. Character limits differ, hashtags help on some platforms and look out of place on others, and the tone people expect changes from one feed to the next. A caption pasted everywhere unchanged usually fits one platform and feels off on the rest.

Start from one draft and adapt it. In eksis, the AI Assistant writes to the length limits of the channels you selected, Suggest hashtags proposes tags for the caption you already have, and Customize for each channel lets you edit every version separately before it goes into the queue.

Draft replies with AI, then read every one

Replies to comments and messages are where AI saves the most time, and where a careless answer costs the most. A wrong price or a cheerful reply to an angry customer can easily end up in a screenshot.

Use AI for the first draft, then read it as if your name is on it, because it is. In the eksis inbox, Suggest a reply offers draft answers to the message you have open. Picking one puts it in the reply box, and nothing is sent until you press send.

Check every fact yourself

AI writes confident sentences whether or not they are true. Before anything goes out, check every price, date, time, and address, every claim about what your product does, every statistic and where it came from, and every name or handle you mention.

For apologies and anything legal or medical, write the post yourself and use AI at most to check spelling.

Let the assistant you already use do the busywork

If you already work in Claude or ChatGPT, you can stop copying captions between tabs. eksis runs an MCP server (MCP is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to other apps), so a connected assistant can see your channels and create posts in your eksis workspace. Ask it to turn this week's notes into posts. They are saved as drafts unless you ask for something else, so you can review them in eksis before anything is scheduled.

The setup steps for Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Codex are on the developers page.

Try it on your next post

The AI Assistant is included on every eksis plan, including Free. Pick a post you were going to write this week, give it a proper brief, and edit the draft with the steps above. Create a free account to try it, or check the monthly AI limits for each plan on the pricing page.