Publish one post out to every social account with n8n

You spend a day on a post. You publish it. Then you are supposed to write four more versions of it for four different platforms, and by that point you would rather do almost anything else.

So it does not get done, and a piece of work that took a day gets seen by whoever happened to be on the site.

This is a small build that closes that gap. It watches your feed, and when something new appears it puts it where your audience is.

Start with the awkward bit

X used to be the easy one. It is not any more.

X removed free API access for new developers in early 2026 and moved to pay-per-use billing, in which creating a post costs money and a post containing a link costs several times more than one without. Not a fortune per post, but enough that syndicating everything you publish has a running cost, and enough that the maths changes if you post daily.

Anything you read online that says “connect the free X API” was written before that and has not been updated. Check the current pricing yourself before building it in, because this has moved more than once.

For most small businesses the honest recommendation is to leave X out of this workflow. Automate LinkedIn and Facebook, where the API is free and where a business audience mostly is, and post to X by hand on the rare occasions it is worth it.

The build, eight nodes

1. Schedule Trigger. Every hour. There is no benefit to being faster than that and a polite interval keeps your own server happy.

2. RSS Read. Point it at https://yoursite.co.uk/rss.xml or wherever yours lives. If you do not know, try /feed, /rss.xml and /feed.xml in a browser: one of them will be it.

RSS is the right trigger here even though it feels old-fashioned. It works identically on every platform, it needs no plugin or webhook, and it survives you changing CMS, which a webhook does not.

3. Remove Duplicates. Compare on link, keep across executions. Without this the first run posts your entire back catalogue at once, which is a memorable way to learn about this node.

4. IF node, called Recent Enough. Only continue if the post is less than 48 hours old. This is the safety net for the day you rebuild the site, all the GUIDs change, and Remove Duplicates decides seventy posts are new. Belt and braces, and the braces cost one node.

5. Basic LLM Chain, called Draft. Take the title and description, produce the post text. Two rules in the prompt make the difference between this being useful and being embarrassing:

Ask for a specific number of words, around 40 to 60. Left unbounded, models write 200 words with a summary paragraph and three bullet points, which is not a social post.

Ban the openers. Put it in the prompt explicitly: no “Excited to share”, no “In today’s world”, no rhetorical question as the first line, no emoji. Those are the exact phrases that make a post read as generated, and models default to all of them.

Better still, ask for the most surprising specific fact in the piece, stated plainly, followed by the link. That is a post shape that works and that a model can actually do, because it is extraction rather than invention.

6. Wait, optional but recommended. n8n’s Wait node can pause on a webhook, which lets you send yourself the draft and have the workflow continue only when you click approve. It turns this from publishing on your behalf into drafting on your behalf, and the difference in output quality is large.

If that feels like too much friction, put the Wait on a timer of an hour instead and set a reminder to look. Something between “read every one” and “never see any of them” is where most people end up.

7 and 8. LinkedIn and Facebook. Both take the text and the link, and both branch from the approval node rather than chaining one after the other, so a failure on one does not stop the other.

LinkedIn wants the link as a separate field, not pasted in the text, or you get the URL twice: once as text and once as the preview card.

Make the versions differ

The single biggest thing you can do to make this not look automated is to not post the same text everywhere.

It costs one extra instruction in the prompt. Ask for two variants: one for LinkedIn, a little longer, ending on a question that a person could answer from their own experience. One for Facebook, shorter and warmer.

Same effort, and a person who follows you in two places stops seeing the same paragraph twice, which is the thing that gives the game away.

Do not automate replies

Worth saying plainly, because it is the obvious next step and it is a mistake.

Posting on a schedule is scheduling. Replying to a comment is a conversation, and a generated reply in public is recognisable, permanently attached to your name, and read by everyone who sees the thread. The one time it goes wrong costs more than every correct reply gained you.

Get the workflow to tell you a comment arrived. Write the reply yourself. That is thirty seconds and it is the only part of social media that does anything.

What to expect

Not much traffic, honestly, and it is worth saying so.

Syndication is not a growth channel by itself. What it does is stop the work you already did from being invisible, and it keeps the accounts alive so that when somebody looks you up after a recommendation, there is something there rather than a page last updated in 2024.

That is a modest benefit. It is also an afternoon’s work once, and then it happens forever without anybody remembering.