How To Automate Generating Social Posts with AI

As part of the booknotes.ai series, I will show you how to build a workflow for creating and scheduling social media marketing posts. 

For this example, I will be using Instagram, but you can set up this workflow for whatever other social media platform you want to use, like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. In the first part of this series, I showed you how I created a booknotes.ai with a book recommendation service created with AI.

What tools will be using in this tutorial?

To create this workflow, you will need to use a few different pieces of software.

• Airtable - This is going to be used as our content calendar. It is also directly linked to our database that houses our content for the website.
• ChatGPT - will be used to generate the text that we will be using in our Instagram prompts
• Placid - will be used to generate our social images. We will be using the book covers stored in our books database and a gradient background.
• make.com - to set up the workflows for creating and scheduling our social media marketing posts

To-Do List

In order to create and schedule our social media posts, we need to take a few steps.

• The first step is to test our prompts for OpenAI. We want to use the playground to see what responses we get for each prompt, so that when we start running our workflow we know what to expect.
• After we have settling on our prompt, we will start creating our first workflow that will allow us to create our social posts. We will store all assets (text and images) in Airtable, so we can make adjustments prior to scheduling.
• The final part will be to set up our workflow for scheduling our posts.

Testing Prompts in the GPT-3 Playground

ChatGPT playground is great for experimenting with prompts. I typically like to use established frameworks and see what results I will get. I typically experiment with at least 3 different frameworks and 3 different examples to see what the AI returns across a wider range of examples.

Once I consistently get the results from the AI that I am looking for, I move on to the next step.

Setting Up the Social Media Post-Generation Workflow

The first step in generating our social media post is to tell make.com when we want to trigger the workflow. We start by triggering a webhook in make.com.

This webhook is triggered by automation set up in Airtable Automation that fires a webhook when a book record’s social post status is changed to “Generate”. To learn about how to use webhooks to fire workflows in make.com go to this article here.

Retrieve the Airtable record

In order for us to populate our prompt and our Instagram table with data from the right record in Airtable, we use the GET airtable record. The Record ID is passed through with the webhook.

Create GPT Prompt

Populate your prompt with all relevant information in Airtable. OpenAI has their own GPT-3 integration with Make now, so you don’t even need to use custom HTTP modules like in the previous step. I recommend copying the prompt direct from GPT playground into your prompt field.

Also, determine how many tokens you want to spend - refer her to how pricing works for GPT-3.

Generate your Instagram template

In this step we will send our book cover and our dynamic background that we uploaded to Webflow to Placid to generate our social media image.

To do this, you will need to create a template in Placid and select it in your Placid module. There are more details on how to create your Placid template in the next section.

Create a record with your GPT-3 and Placid responses in the Content Calendar table

Make sure to create a content calendar table with a field for your post text and image. Store the values from your workflow responses in there. Update your Book record with the status of “Done” to have a reference that you have created a social post for a record.

Tip: If you want to create a new social post for a book, select “Generate” from the dropdown again, and the workflow will retrigger.

Using Placid to Generate Instagram Templates

To create a template in Placid, you select a size, in my case 1200x1200 for Instagram and start adding layers.

In my example I added to image layers. One for the background and one for the book cover. It is a good idea to use realistic images to test, so you can make adjustments before running your Placid workflows.

Ensure to make the elements dynamic if you want to change them in the workflow. You can do this by selecting the dynamic element symbol in the layer panel.

Setting Up the "Post to Instagram" Workflow

Set up the trigger event to be on a schedule. You can select what time of the day you want to post. In this step, make.com with check a view inside of Airtable to see whether or not a record that meets certain conditions, i.e. in my case status “Status = Scheduled” and “Date=Today”.

If a record it in there, it will run the workflow, otherwise it will just recheck tomorrow.

Create a post on Instagram

The hard part about this part is getting it all a Instagram for Business account set up. You will need to for starters create your instagram account and then make it a business account.

You might need to jump to business.facebook.com and give it permissions. I found a few resources online that allowed me to do this.

Populate your fields with the Instagram photo and text that you stored in the previous workflow. Update the status of the social posts to “Published” when workflow has successfully run and published your social post.

To sum up, I covered how to automate the creation and scheduling of social media marketing posts using Airtable, ChatGPT, and Placid. I explained how to set up the workflow, including testing prompts in the GPT-3 Playground, setting up the social media post-generation workflow, and scheduling the posts. The workflow is demonstrated using Instagram, but can be adapted for other social media platforms.

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