Generating better tweets with ChatGPT

I've been updating the TweetFeast AI tweet generator code and I discovered some tricks you can use to get ChatGPT to write better tweets.

If you've ever used ChatGPT to generate tweets with a prompt like "Please write 10 tweets on the topic of startups" you'll know the results can be pretty hit and miss. Let's be honest "hit and miss" is an understatement. You get bland and over-excited tweets devoid of any value, brimming with emojis and zero-interest hash tags. Basically you get tweets nobody wants to read.

While working on the AI tweet generator I ran into this problem and I've found an approach that works well. You can do this yourself directly in ChatGPT, or you can try TweetFeast - judge the results for yourself. TweetFeast will also use your own tweets as a style reference, or tweets from anybody else you nominate.

The basic solution lies in getting ChatGPT to be more "thoughtful". You want it to come up with some meta context about what it means to write good tweets before it actually writes the tweets. Here's a prompt I give ChatGPT before I ask it to write the tweets:

Thinking like a smart and thoughtful person with a large following on Twitter and a strong social media presence, what are some tips for writing tweets that get a lot of likes, retweets, and are widely shared? Also what are the main categories of these types of tweets?

ChatGPT will respond with a well thought out answer about how to structure tweets and what kind of content to put in them. Then you can ask it to tweet on the topic of your choice. Here are some more things you can do to have it come up with even better tweets:

• Give it lots of content about the topic, not just "startups", but paste some text that says something interesting about startups or startup life.
• Ask it to expand upon and/or summarize the topic and come up with points from it that will make engaging tweets before it writes the tweets.
• Give it a concrete list of rules to follow. Things like "minimise the use of emojis" and "don't reference other accounts with the @ symbol".

Hopefully these tips will help you use ChatGPT for tweet authoring. As with anything in life there's no free lunch. You have to put in a bit of work on the prompts to get good results. Or you can let TweetFeast put the work in for you of course.

PS No AI was used to generate this post. I wrote it myself. :)