The way things are headed, social media marketing courses could soon be a thing of the past. 

A new social media sharing platform called Lately uses artificial intelligence to generate and optimize social media posts automatically.

Lately CEO Kate Bradley Chernis

I spoke to Kate Bradley Chernis, the founder and CEO of Lately, a tool that’s doing wonders for content consultants who struggle to translate their written or multimedia content into engaging social media posts. 

Lately uses AI to automatically transform long-form content into dozens of smart social posts that optimize audience engagement. Kate talked to us about generating leads for B2Bs, how to successfully create a human-AI collaboration, and how to earn the trust of your customers.

The idea behind Lately is not to waste something we’ve spent a lot of effort creating by giving it just one shot at being viewed. This is especially true of long content marketing initiatives like blogs, podcasts, videos, reports, white papers, checklists and other lead magnets which aren’t so easily shareable in social media. 

When you load this content into Lately, the tool transforms it into dozens os  posts you can schedule to go live on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin

Lately uses AI and natural language processing to select the most shareable, conversation worthy snippets from your long form content based on what generates conversations with your community. 

Lately takes you three quarters of the way, but requires a human touch for the last stretch. Before Lately, this process had to be performed manually, which takes a lot of time and resources. Lately analyzes all of your past content, and treats past user engagement as a proxy for future performance, and automatically produces posts likely to generate similar responses.

Bradley recommends users start in Lately's Analytics section before the content creation process. "Why look at Twitter when we're telling you what's trending with your customers?" she says. "Emotion is what a purchase is all about",  says Kate. "The number one reason for loss of sales is lack of customer trust. That's why it's so important for you to like me and believe me."

Kate believes first and foremost in organic marketing, and she asserts that, for B2Bs and small businesses, this is the cheapest, easiest and most reliable way to make a dent. 

"The time and effort you put in is exponentially valuable,” says Kate.  Following that spirit, her company doesn't use paid media, cold calls or cold email to do their marketing. They use Lately. "When you know what your customer cares about, why would you guess?"

Lately can transcribe whole podcasts and webinars and automatically pull excerpts that your audience is likely to respond to, and is even able to turn those into shareable mini-movies. 

Bradley is a big advocate of “after the fact” marketing, now that people rarely consume content at fixed times. The process can work even for whole books, like David Allison’s “Valuegraphics”, which got to a number 1 slot at Amazon’s global best sellers list, thanks partly to social posts generated by Lately.

The last part of the conversation touched upon confidence issues, in these times where people have lost faith in news and social media. For Bradley, people now tend to believe more in trusted individuals than in organizations, but at the same time long-standing brands give a feel of security. 

https://youtu.be/tBL8Z6aKjR0

As I learned when I was handling social media communications at the US Dept. of State,