Get the most out of your social content with AI in 2025

1. Turn your brand kit into a suite.

A brand suite is a cohesive package of all of your essential branding elements, including:

1. Fonts
2. Color palettes
3. Logos
4. Design templates

Creating a brand suite is just the beginning. Once you have this information in your Adobe Express account, use it to streamline social media content creation. “There’s a new feature called Apply Brand that I’ve been using to really speed things up,” O’Keefe explains. “Take that template and click Apply Brand. Suddenly, my color palettes are applied, and my fonts are applied.”

Apply Brand is a game-changer for time-strapped small business owners. “It’s very useful because the layout and knowing where to put everything can often be the last eye we develop when looking at our content,” O’Keefe adds.

Adobe Express also includes generative AI tools for social media posts that quickly resize content for multiple platforms in just a few clicks. “Let’s say I have that square Instagram post, and I want to turn it into an Instagram story with some animations. I can just resize it and change it to the Instagram story dimensions,” he explains. “Every page you add to the document can be a completely different size. That’s very unique to other tools I’ve used.”

Generative Extend is also helpful, especially when images aren’t quite the right size. “Let’s say I’m resizing an Instagram story, so it’s a very vertical, skinny document, right? I can resize a photo and extend it to a wider document,” O’Keefe says. “AI generates whatever’s missing from the dimensions of that photo to fill out the design, which is really cool. Talk about a time saver as a non-designer who loves design.”

2. Get (and stay) specific.

Imagine telling generative AI you need a social media post with a certain vibe or a business flyer with a bold, professional look. With Text to Template, an exclusive Adobe Express capability, you provide a prompt, and generative AI creates a custom template based on your needs from a library of fonts, images, and design elements.

For creators, this means less time spent fiddling with design elements and more time focused on your brand’s message. Need a marketing material template? Just ask. Want a social media post template? No problem. The generative AI video-editing tool generates unique templates you can tweak to make your own.

“I use a text prompt to generate a social media post template, a marketing material template, or a business material template that I can then edit and use as my project,” O’Keefe says. “It’ll pull from all the different fonts, images, and elements available, and it will even use text-to-image generative AI to generate images and put them into the template for you. So you really are getting a unique template that nobody else is going to find on Adobe Express or on any other content creation platform.”

Text to Template gives you a solid starting point, no matter your skill set. “Regardless of our experience level, we can all relate to that feeling of staring at a blank screen,” he says.

Overcome writer’s block by filling in your blank project with professional elements ready for customizing. Then tap into the power of Adobe Express and its impressive template library. “I actually find it’s one of the most unique and really professional high-quality template libraries out there,” O’Keefe says.

Since generative AI tools can only generate what you give them, the more detailed your prompts, the better results you’ll get. For example, instead of simply asking for “a professional flyer,” try “a modern, minimalist business flyer with a blue and white color scheme featuring bold headers.” Don’t be afraid to prompt a few times until you get what you want.

3. Prioritize culturalization.

When people think about your brand, they should feel an emotional connection. It goes beyond fonts, colors, or logos — this process is about weaving your brand identity into every aspect of how people experience your offerings. “A brand, and especially a culture, is a lot more than just your fonts and your colors,” O’Keefe says.

To create a brand culture that sticks, you need to focus on these five elements:

1. Position. What’s your business’s unique selling proposition (USP)? Who do you support? What do you create or offer? Position tells potential customers how you’re different from everyone else on the market.
2. Promise. What do you deliver to customers? Your promise tells both customers and employees what they can expect from you, no matter what.
3. Personality. Just like people have individual personalities, so do businesses. Some businesses prefer to be more formal, others casual. What matters is that you define a personality for your business and allow it to shine through all of your social media content.
4. Story. A story is the telling of your brand’s history. It should include factual information, like your founding date and products, as well as emotional appeals showing how you make customers’ lives better.
5. Associations. This is a fancy term for your brand components, like your logo, color palette, and fonts.

All of these components have one thing in common: consistency. “Consistency is what makes brand culture happen,” O’Keefe explains. That means staying true to your brand’s voice, image, and content-posting frequency — but that’s a tall order for resource-strapped small businesses.

Fortunately, everyone has access to time-saving generative AI for small businesses. Not only do these tools help you maintain consistency, but platforms like Adobe Express also make it a cinch to scale up content creation in less time. “In a world where everybody can use generative AI, it’s great because [AI] makes it an even playing field,” O’Keefe says. “AI tools really speed up our workflow.” As long as you know what makes your brand unique and have established your brand culture, generative AI will help you stay true to what makes your brand exceptional, even when producing tons of content.

4. Do more with video.

Video marketing is essential to growing your brand. However, social media video goes a step further: it encourages engagement, sharing, and genuine connections that your customers will remember. “It almost is a necessity to show up these days with some sort of video on social media to get your brand out there,” O’Keefe says. “Video goes hand in hand with standing out and being unique. Nobody can be you on video as well as you can. That’s why I find video to be super important.”

There’s just one catch: most small business owners aren’t content creators, much less on-screen personalities. It’s no wonder O’Keefe finds that video is the most intimidating content for small business owners. “It can be very overwhelming to get started,” he admits.

You don’t have to become a polished influencer to create social media videos. “Just show up and tell your story,” O’Keefe explains. That’s easier said than done for the camera shy, but there are ways around that. A Day in the Life videos, for example, use voiceovers as a clever workaround that connects you with customers without having to be on screen at all.

Still, it’s nice to put a face to the brand if you can. “I’ve done videos in Adobe Express where it’s been me speaking to the camera, and I record my thoughts,” O’Keefe says. Quickly edit videos in Adobe Express to cut out any bloopers and show your best side to the camera.

B-roll footage is also a handy tool for boosting engagement. “When it’s me talking every few seconds, I’ll go into Adobe Express stock video and overlay a clip of B-roll footage that relates to my subject. This way, I’m grabbing more attention, and it isn’t just me on screen for 40 seconds,” O’Keefe says.

You can also turn more heads by animating text, images, and shapes. Insert or replace objectswith generative AI for social media posts. Music and sound effects generate even more engagement, although sourcing your own music comes with legal concerns. Lean on Adobe’s huge library of stock audio to find brand-safe media for peace of mind. “I need to use readily available music for business or commercial usage. Adobe Stock has tons of those,” O’Keefe says.

The Adobe Express generative AI video-editing tool also helps with accessibility. “Think about the fact that someone might be watching your video with no sound on at all,” O’Keefe says. “People want to consume content on their own terms, and for many people, that might mean without sound.”

There’s no need to add captions yourself or transcribe audio, either. “Adobe Express has an awesome on-screen captions feature,” he explains. “From the Adobe Express main page, you can actually put your video in there, and it’ll add dynamic on-screen captions based on your voiceover. I’ve found it to be extremely accurate.”