Content automation waterfall

One RSS feed to rule them all

One of the reasons why I started a substack channel is because I came across a couple of blog posts and one influencer who talked about personal brands and content waterfall methods. The key learning I pick up from studying how to build personal brands was authenticity and that all your social channels should show the same version of yourself. I quickly realized that my social channels were representing a different kinds of my public image. In this article I’m going to talk about public image on social media and waterfall content automation methods that I built myself to foster my brand image.

I happened to come across a pure “content machine” public figure Matt Gray, he came across as someone who really gets how to build a modern personal brand. He helped me learn about content waterfall method. One of his examples:

1 Twitter thread becomes:

• 5 tweets

• 2 Instagram Reels

• 1 Instagram Carousel

• 2 YouTube Shorts

• 1 Newsletter

• 2 TikTok videos

• 1 LinkedIn Carousel

The idea is to reuse a piece of content through multiple social channels. I like this strategy because it looked like a very lazy approach that yields maximum results. We programmers are lazy people that always seek maximum results. It’s in our DNA. So I quickly picked up this strategy and decided to build some automation around this. I knew that I could build something like this in a programmatic way if I was able to find and RSS feed through a publisher platform like substack. Then I just had to choose a free service how to build an automation and Make.com offers free 1000 operations per month which seemed more than enough for a someone like me. I also was much familiar how make works as I built a lot more complicated pipelines before:

My idea was to use LLM text generator model like 4o-mini from ChatGPT so I could taylor custom prompt for different channels, for example for LinkedIn my prompt looked like this:

Create a professional summary of this Substack article in 1-2 paragraphs (300 words max). Focus on business insights, professional development aspects, or industry relevance. Include 3 bullet points highlighting key takeaways and end with a thoughtful question to encourage engagement. Article: {{article_content}}

When it comes to X for example, my prompt gets tailor for a different social channel:

Summarize the following Substack article in a compelling thread of 3-4 tweets (max 280 characters each). Maintain the article's key insights and include a hook in the first tweet. Add relevant hashtags.

Article: {{article_content}}

With such a system I managed to automate a single blog post through a number of social channels in a matter of seconds. At the moment I only have three, but in the future planning to reuse all the content I’m writing here on substack to video platforms as well. I came across a video strategy called “brain rot” which uses easy to consume video content, usually video game records with audio generations from your blog posts. I still haven’t tested but this could be something that works!

In conclusion, content waterfall automation is my new personal strategy to build a personal brand and execute this plan through automation pipeline that I build with substack RSS feed, ChatGPT and social media client integrations.