I Built an n8n workflow that turns any Instagram profile into a daily stream of original content ideas (sent straight to Telegram)
I kept running into the same problem: I'd scroll through accounts in my niche for "inspiration" and end up either wasting an hour or subconsciously drifting toward recreating what they'd already posted. So I built a small n8n workflow to do the research part for me, with one hard rule: it suggests ideas, it never rewrites someone else's post.
How it works
- RSS Feed Trigger. I point it at an RSS feed of a public Instagram profile (I used an RSS generator service for this). Whenever that account posts, the workflow fires.
- Edit Fields. Strips the feed item down to what matters: caption, post date, and link. Everything else is noise.
- Google Sheets (Append row). Logs every post into a sheet. Over time this becomes a nice record of what topics a niche is talking about and how often.
- Basic LLM Chain + Anthropic Chat Model. This is where the actual work happens. The model doesn't get asked to "rewrite this." It's asked to figure out the underlying topic or question the post is tapping into, then come up with fresh angles I could take from my own experience.
- Telegram. Sends me a short message with the ideas, so they're waiting on my phone when I sit down to plan content.
The prompt is the important part
Roughly what I'm telling the model:
>You'll receive a caption from a creator's post. Do NOT paraphrase, summarize, or restructure it. Identify the broader theme or audience question behind it. Then suggest 3 original post ideas on that theme, each with a different angle (personal story, contrarian take, how-to, etc.). Ideas should be clearly distinct from the source post in hook, format, and wording.
Framing it as "what's the conversation here, and what could I add to it" rather than "make me something like this" made a huge difference. The output reads like a brainstorming partner, not a copy machine.
What you could do to improve the workflow:
- Feed in multiple profiles and have the LLM spot recurring themes across them, not just per post
- Add a filter so it only pings me when a topic shows up more than once (signal vs. noise)
- Pull my own past posts into the prompt so it avoids suggesting stuff I've already covered
Happy to share the workflow JSON or the full prompt if anyone wants it. Also curious how others are handling the "inspired by vs. copying" line when using AI for content research.
