Using AI for Social Media — and Keeping It Personal

Like you, I know social media is an important part of my business — it’s where a lot of my students first find me. The trick is showing up there consistently, in my own voice, without it taking over my week. In this video I’ll show you exactly how I do that with the help of AI.

This is the third in my Behind the Scenes series, where I’m documenting how I’m rebuilding Skillful Mind using AI — so other meditation teachers and wellness business owners can do the same. In the last post we set up a file structure so the AI really understands your business. Now we put that foundation to work on one of my own pet difficulties: social media.

The real challenge: automation and authenticity

Here’s the honest tension. It’s easy to get AI to produce fifty or a hundred posts — you type one command and out they come. But if that’s all you do, the posts come out generic. Other people are calling it “AI slop,” and they’re right. It’s not personal to you, and people see through it almost immediately.

So the whole challenge is to automate the process and keep it personal at the same time. Get both right and AI becomes genuinely useful. Get only the first and you’re just adding to the noise.

Start with a plan, then plenty of ideas

This is where the work from the last video pays off. Because the AI already knows your business, you can point it at all that material and ask it for ideas.

I start by asking it for a social media plan. Mine suggests a healthy mix — a post about the teaching I’ve done, a post about meditation itself, a post promoting an upcoming event, and so on across the themes that matter to my business. Once I’ve got a plan, I ask it to generate lots of specific post ideas off the back of it. That becomes the raw material. Then comes the part that keeps it all personal.

One table to organise everything

In the video I show you the table where I organise every social media post. You could use Excel or Google Sheets for this. But I’d really suggest you look at Airtable — or, like me, Baserow, which is basically the same thing but I can host it myself. The reason these are so good is that you can drop the actual photos and media right inside the cells, so the whole plan is visual and easy to scan. AI even helped me design the columns.

Mine is laid out by where the post goes (my personal page, my Skillful MIND page, a private group for the meditation leaders who’ve joined me, and LinkedIn), the type of post (story, event, teaching), the format (a reel, a photo, a graphic), the post copy and image, and the date it’s due to go out.

Where the images come from

Once I have a list of ideas, the AI takes each one and builds the copy and picks a picture to go with it. It draws from a whole library of real photos — pictures of me, of my retreats, the ones I keep in a folder. You can generate AI images too, and now and then I’ll add one when I want something different. But as much as possible I keep it real, with real pictures. That’s a big part of staying authentic.

The step that keeps it personal

This is the most important step, so don’t skip it. Every post lands in Draft first — nothing goes out automatically without me.

One of the things I love about Baserow (and Airtable) is views — the same table shown a different way. I have a review view where I go through each draft, read the copy, look at the photo, and make sure it actually sounds like me. Reading one quickly, I’ll usually tweak a line so it lands the way I’d really say it. When I’m happy with the words and the picture, I press Approved — and it drops out of my review view. On its scheduled date, the AI posts it for me.

There’s a nice side benefit, too: when I make a video like this one, I pull snippets out of it and feed them back in as reels and photo posts. So the very video you’re watching becomes next month’s content as well.

What this actually gives me

I can sit down and line up a couple of weeks — even a month — of posts in advance. For someone like me, who doesn’t much enjoy endless scrolling and posting, this is the difference between staying connected to my students and quietly disappearing from their feeds. It keeps me present, and it only takes a couple of hours a month.

That’s the whole system: a plan, a table, and a review step that protects your voice. Automated where it should be, personal where it counts.

And if you’d like to experience what a well-run meditation group looks and feels like, come and join us for Sunday Online Meditation. It’s free, it’s on Zoom, and everyone is welcome.

All the best,
Peter
Skillful MIND