Using ChatGPT to generate social posts with Google Alerts

I wanted to try some no-code application using automation and ChatGPT. I thought that a problem I has was to post relevant things on social media. Usually I try to follow interesting people on twitter and save articles etc… but I tried to image a way to automate this. The important points were that the articles/links needed to be very recent and that I still maintained some control on what I posted.

Set up a RSS feed on Google alerts

For example, I want to create posts about the 3D printing industry. So I go on Google Alerts and I create a RSS feed about that particular topic.

Use Zapier to add the content of the articles in sheets

To automate the flow of using the RSS to get relevant data, I just create a zap on Zapier and create a flow that will transform the RSS into useable, promptable text.
1. have the RSS sent to a Google Sheet
2. Extract the clean URL to the article
2. Parse the link to get the content of the article
3. Remove html tags (to decrease the number of token requests to ChatGPT), could be optimized even further if you really want to focus only on the tags that contain text.

Use Sheets to create a prompt

Once you have the content that is clean and the link you can concat the different elements of the prompt:
1. The URL to the article
2. The Clean content of the article
3. The prompt itself. in this case the promp was “Could you make a snazzy and fun linkedin post that summarizes this article ? It needs to be in the tone of a 3D printing manufacturing specialist that gives an opinion. It should be 50 words or less with lots of emojis, hashtags and contain this original link of the article.“

Get Zapier to send the result in a Notion Database

Et Voilà!

Super easy to do, this took my like a couple of hours. Couple of issues were the RSS feed that didn’t really send clean links so it was a bit tough to extract and had to use some REGEX to make sure links worked.

Another issue is that the RSS feed some times sends weird articles that don’t really make sense or match your topic. So you can’t trust it fully and add it to a buffer feed for example. But it’s awesome and saves so much time for my social posts!

Regarding costs, the OpenAI price was pretty much insignificant as articles are usually small. The only problem for single user use is the $20/month Zapier subscription which could be reduced heavily if more users were to join the product (wink wink!)

Future Development

We could imagine this working really well for social selling. People that need to be put forward as advocates on niche subjects. This has been useful for promoting the french startup ecosystem in my job.

In terms of tech development, we can easily image adding a generated image to the social post to make is truly unique and adding a saas dimension to it.

Let me know what you think!