Turning a feed into social posts is one of the most common automations there is. A blog publishes, and the post should reach the places your audience actually reads.
Before building anything, one question saves most people the work.
Do you need a workflow at all?
If all you want is “new item in feed becomes a post”, you probably don’t.
BulkPublish reads RSS and Atom feeds natively. You add a feed URL, it polls, and new items become posts.
- Feeds: Free: 1. Pro: 10. Business: 50.
- Auto-publish: paid plans. On Free, feed items arrive as drafts for a person to review, and requesting publish mode returns a 403 rather than silently downgrading
- Polling: conditional requests using ETag and Last-Modified, so an unchanged feed costs almost nothing, with exponential backoff from 15 minutes up to 24 hours when a feed errors
Set that up in a couple of minutes and there’s no workflow to maintain.
Build in n8n when you need something the built-in reader deliberately doesn’t do: filtering on content, rewriting text before it posts, routing different items to different accounts, pulling in a second source, or fanning out to things beyond social.
The workflow
1. RSS Feed Trigger. Point it at the feed URL and set a poll interval. Match the interval to how often the source actually publishes. Polling a weekly blog every minute is just noise.
2. Filter. The step most workflows should have and don’t. Not every item deserves a post. Filter on category, title keyword or author so you’re not broadcasting every changelog entry.
3. Set, to build the post text. This is where a workflow beats the built-in reader. Rather than posting the title and a link, build something worth reading: a line of context, then the link. If you want the model to write it, insert an AI node here and give it the item’s title and summary.
4. BulkPublish node, Post → Create. Pass the text, the channels and optionally a scheduled time. The community node covers posts, channels, channel sets, media, labels, RSS feeds, analytics, schedules and quota, so later steps can do more than create.
5. Schedule rather than publish immediately. Feed items arrive when the source publishes, which is rarely when your audience is reading. Setting a time turns a mechanical relay into something that looks deliberate.
Things worth getting right
Deduplicate. The trigger handles this in normal operation, but a feed that changes item GUIDs, or a workflow re-run after an error, can produce repeats. If the source is at all unreliable, keep a record of what you’ve already posted and check against it.
Fix the length per platform. A title plus a summary plus a link overruns the shorter platforms. Trim before you post, don’t let the platform truncate.
Handle the image. Many feeds include one and many don’t. Decide what happens when there isn’t one, rather than discovering it on a platform that requires media.
Don’t post everything. The most common failure here isn’t technical. It’s an account that becomes a feed relay, posting fifteen times on a busy day and nothing on a quiet one. Filtering is what keeps it looking like an account someone runs.
Draft first
For the first week, create posts as drafts rather than publishing. You’ll see exactly what the workflow produces without an audience seeing it, and the things you’d want to fix are obvious in a list of ten drafts.
Plan limits worth knowing
- Channels: Free: 3 (1 per platform). Pro: 30 (2 per platform). Business: 75 (5 per platform).
- Posts: Free: 3/day. Pro: 30/day. Business: unlimited.
- API requests/day: Free: 30. Pro: 5,000. Business: 50,000.
The free tier’s 30 API requests a day is sized for evaluating an automation rather than running one continuously. A real feed pipeline wants a paid plan.
BulkPublish publishes to 15 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Threads, Bluesky, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Discord, Telegram, Tumblr and Snapchat.
The short version
If you want new feed items to become posts, use the built-in RSS reader. Build the n8n workflow when you need filtering, rewriting, routing or a second source. Either way, filter what gets posted, schedule rather than relay, and run it into drafts for a week before letting it publish.