SETUP VIDEO STEP-BY-STEP - Social Media Scheduling - Blotato // For Viral LinkedIn Posts (n8n)

This is going to be a quick tutorial, as quick as I can make it on setting up the social media scheduling to create viral LinkedIn posts based on outlier posts that others have created.

So the traditional way in which we grow YouTube, LinkedIn, etc is actually look at what others doing really well and emulate those but take our own brand voice.

So you've probably come here having seen the original video.

So this will go through node by node so that you understand exactly what's going on and follow these setup, instructions here.

So it's really simple to follow.

So the first is copy the airtable base linked in the classroom.

So in the classroom section where you found this template there will be the airtable base.

Once you open it up it will be either V1 or V2.

and what you're going to do is effectively copy that airtable base.

You're going to come up here, you're going to click on here and three dots and duplicate that base.

You're going to save it into your own airtable.

You don't need a paid airtable account, but there is a limit of a gigabyte on storage on a free plan.

So if you're storing anything like carousels, etc, you might want to clear those out every so often or just upgrade to the paid plan and then you can store a lot more.

So it's going to look exactly like this.

You're going to have all of the inputs that I demonstrated in the video, including some sample outputs that I've scraped from some creators as well, and some sample carousel outputs here.

You're also going to then need to set up an airtable token if you haven't already.

I've included a separate video link there, to show you how to do that if you haven't.

And you need to make sure that you it's also shown in that video but give the token access to that new base that you've created.

That's really important.

Otherwise none of these airtable nodes will work.

Once you've created a copy of the air, table, it's all linked up correctly.

You need to add your air table inputs.

So if we go into the example here, there are certain inputs that you need to put in, and all of the mandatory ones where possible I've put an exclamation mark.

So you need to put in like a creative profile you want to emulate.

So they're LinkedIn profiles.

you need to make sure you put max posts, but anything that's not Marked as mandatory is not necessarily mandatory.

The second thing is you need to insert your own brand guidelines.

So I've just put a template here, but it's got voice guidelines in here.

You can use something like Claude to help you, create those voice guidelines and then insert a bit of information about your product and audience there as well.

This is really important because you don't want to be just copying somebody else's style, you want to write it in your style.

So a really good way to do this is ask Chord to look at your previous posts or post in a text or video transcript that you filmed and get it to create some voice guidelines.

Just as a basic start there.

if you are in the paid community as well, we have this getting AI to write copy like you module.

So this is a really powerful way in actually getting AI to write, content that is almost undetectable by AI, but also a really amazing resource that basically creates copy in your brand voice or in your own personal voice.

And I've just done that and plugged that straight into, my guidelines in here.

So if you're in the paid community, you've got these guidelines for my voice in here as well.

So what you're then going to do is you've in included a crater to scrape, you've got the brand guidelines.

We then need to make sure that we have actually set up our air table.

So we're actually going to just do step 10 now.

I'm going to remove that, and put that as step six instead, which is changing the webhook names and move that.

So by the time you see this, it will be step six.

we've got, for the first flow, or actually let me explain the flows first we've got two main flows.

The first is extracting posts from your favorite creators and the second is drafting those posts.

So there's a few critical resources which we need to set up.

But first we want to test that our buttons link to the correct triggers here.

So you can see they're both webhook buttons and, and inside Airtable we've got a really clean way of activating workflows through a button which makes it really controllable.

So inside here we've got a product, a production URL and a path here you can see that I can copy this webhook address here.

I'd highly recommend using the default whichever Nan gives you here instead of creating a path name here.

And the reason for that is it's more secure, nobody can guess, or it's harder to guess that random configuration of numbers than it is to you know, allow people to easily see this webhook and test it.

So after this I'm going to go and change mine as well so that it doesn't appear as scraped now so that nobody can use mine.

So what you're going to do is take that production URL and the first webhook on this first flow is the LinkedIn profile scraper.

So what that relates to is if we go back to the creator, pages, we've got this Scrape now button which activates the scraper basically.

So if we go into Edit field and you'll see this URL here, everything before the question mark, we're just going to replace with our URL there.

So I've Control V in there and you can see it passes the record ID back into our workflow.

So what that does is every time we click the button there, it's going to come back into our workflow, activate that, and what we're going to do is be able to retrieve the record details from that record there.

So we're going to have things like the LinkedIn profile URL, the name, how many posts we want to scrape, the status, etc.

We're then going to fire that through to apify.

But before that we actually respond to the webhook with this success message.

So if you see if I click on Scrape now on here and I just want to make sure that we just remove a connection so it doesn't do the whole process for me.

I'm going to click on Scrape now and you'll see that it will now send back a message saying, generating.

If it does not say this and it throws an error, then you need to go to the executions inside Nan up here and see exactly what's happened.

So you can see my execution is running right now and it shouldn't take very long because I've cut the workflow short.

But if it's working properly it should take around.

Well, depending on how many posts you're scraping, like four to six minutes is usual for this scraper because it's scraping a lot of posts, you know, from LinkedIn.

So what it's actually doing is contacting this Harvest API, LinkedIn profile posts.

So if you copy that to Google and you put Apify there, we've got this LinkedIn profile post bulk scraper.

You get $5 free a month on Apify.

So I've included a link down here, to Apify.

That's an affiliate link if you want to use that.

And then there's 25 Simon for 25% off at checkout when you upgrade to a paid plan if you do.

But what you can do is you can see all the inputs and outputs for this.

But all we're doing is sending a request to that scraper, for that LinkedIn profile URL.

So we're sending the profile across here and we're saying we want to scrape this many posts.

We don't want to put also pull every comment that you can if you want, but it's going to cost you more.

And this is going to cost you $2 per 1,000 posts, including engagements.

So it's only going to be $2 for every thousand posts.

So it's super cheap to do this.

What we're then going to do is basically decide is it an image or is it a carousel?

And I've made this so that we can extract every nugget of information we can from here.

So what it's going to do next is basically pull all of the image information, including a description of what is actually in the image as well as the image text.

And that's going to push it all back into our airtable, which we'll see in a minute.

And then the carousel is different because it's basically multiple images.

So we extract all the information that we've got from Apify here, and put it back into our LinkedIn leads database.

So you need to make sure you set up an apify account.

It's fairly straightforward then, to actually get your API key from apify.

So if you just type in apify API token, what you'll do, in fact if you go to the apify dashboard, you go to console, you go to your settings and API and integrations and you just create a new token, copy that token and it's important in the apify node that you effectively.

The only one we're using is here is actually you have this URL, pre programmed.

What you're going to do is use a generic credential, type query auth and make sure it's query auth.

And then inside the apify query auth you're going to call it token and you're going to paste your token in there and then you can test to see if that works with one of these examples.

So whilst we're also setting up or have set up this webhook here, let's quickly set up the second webhook for this draft post for LinkedIn.

So that one is going to be exactly the same process.

Go in here, go to the production URL, copy that and take it back to the scraped posts page.

And then if you scroll all the way to the right, we've got this draft post button, go into edit field and copy that address in there as well and then save so everything before the question mark there.

And we'll come to the second workflow in a moment.

So when you're scraping these images you can use whatever model you want to actually analyze images.

But I found that Gemini is really powerful.

So we've got the inbuilt Gemini mode in here and node, sorry and we're using Gemini 2.5 flashlight and it's just saying extract the text from this image output, only extracted text, nothing more.

So we're just interested in what the image says.

And then we've got the body of the advert, we've got the image text of the advert and we've got all the context that we need to recreate the advert.

So the same happens down here.

So what you're going to need to do is go to Gemini and set up your own API key there.

This will be pre filled in this Gemini credential and you just need to click on the link over here, go to Gemini, get your API key and put it into these two nodes in here.

You need to make sure that all these airtable nodes are connected to the, the correct base.

So once you set up your airtable, make sure that you are connected to your own base.

So actually I'd recommend going into every single airtable Node always when you set up these templates, clicking on this base once you've got your air table node in there and actually reselecting the base, reselecting the table.

So here it's created pages in this second one it is viral content engine creator pages.

So I literally go into each of these and reselect this and the reason is sometimes it messes up when the name changes or it doesn't find your, your air table base.

So I literally go into all of those and reselect those and that should be the point where you actually now have that first flow ready to go and scrape posts.

So you should now be able to move to step 10 which is test run and troubleshoot the first flow.

And the way I do that is go to the creator pages, set up a new creator, put max post as 10 or 5 or something, make sure it's ticked as scrape, click scrape now and this will move to in progress and it will start scraping the posts and then if it's working correctly it will start putting the posts on the bottom of this scrape post list.

Then we move on to how can we actually generate the posts.

So, so what we're going to do next is basically move on step 11.

Now Platato is a really powerful platform for two great reasons for this use case.

The first is for our carousel templates and the second is actually scheduling all of our content on LinkedIn.

So we're going to go through the link here to potato and what you're going to do, that's an affiliate link.

If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

You're going to, I appreciate it.

You're going to set up an account in potato and that's going to be a free trial.

And then $29 a month if you continue after the seven days you're going to make sure that you then move on to this second workflow.

We've done all the same steps here.

We made sure that our airtable base is connecting to the right base and table.

We've set up the webhook there.

just need to come back here.

And what we're doing now is setting up this post generation stage.

So we'll come back to this over here.

But what we're actually doing is creating the video here for, or the carousel for the template.

So we're going to go into this potato node and to make sure you have the potato node set up you to type in potato over here.

It's going to Appear as this official node maintained by Platato and what you're going to do is basically click an install button here.

It should then be installed.

This is a self hosted version so it should be available on Cloud two.

You'll then have all these different options but first we're going to set up the credential.

So once you set up Potato you'll get given an API key or you can set one up in the Potato account.

You're then going to open the credential over here and you're going to basically just put in the API key.

Platato server is going to be filled out for you and it's going to check your connection.

Now the important part here is choosing your templates etc so we'll come back to that in a moment.

So actually we'll do it right now which is pick your blatato carousel templates.

So I'd advise going to this link in here and Potato are going to improve the documentation around these different templates.

But you can see you can also do like video style things.

But right now we're just going on this new beta thing from template and we're selecting a different template and some of the ones that I demonstrated in the video are the tutorial carousel with mono color background and I think the tutorial carousel with minimalist flat style as well.

And to test those and see what they look like just run some fake examples through here.

Create a video like that and it will you, it will appear in your latest video so you can see exactly what it looks like and whether you want to use that template.

So it will throw you to a new page.

You'll see the video you've created.

There we go.

So this is the nice, a nice template in here and you can see if we drag this along to the different templates over here.

Great.

So what we're doing is basically choosing a template and then you can have different branches here if you want to create multiple templates every time.

But I've chosen to just stick with one template tutorial carousel with mono color background and then fill out the information and again blatato are going to improve the documentation around what information is required.

But you can see in the example here what I've done.

The most important thing is content slides and making sure those content slides are filled out.

But you'll see that if you change to a different style, for example sometimes the map each column manually will disappear.

But this one seems to have worked okay what we're Then doing is basically, once we've created the video in blotato, we're basically going to call for that video file.

And then finally once we've got the video file, we're going to upload it back into our airtable.

So the only thing we haven't covered and I'll show you the, the outputs in a moment.

And what this, this flow leads to is actually setting up open router for the AI functionality.

So I've made a comprehensive prompt inside here.

So you don't really need to amend this unless you have any particular preferences.

It takes in all of these inputs and what you're going to have is basically a lot of information around.

Create me based on the inputs, three outputs that I can choose from that are basic but based in my brand voice.

So the trigger for this is going to be our draft post.

So when you're filling out this draft post, there's a few things you need to make sure happen.

Well first you're, you're actually making sure that has all the information filled in.

So it's got the transcript from the, the text of the image.

So you can see here for example in this image if it loads.

If you can control your mind, you can change your life in the transcript here.

If you can control your mind, you can change your life.

So it's just pulling the image text.

Basically that's what we mean by transcript.

It's got a link to the post, it's got the engagement metrics so you can choose which ones you want to emulate.

We've then got custom instructions and brand voice.

So add any custom instructions for redrafting the post so the custom instructions get pulled through into the prompt.

So for example you're like actually this is a listicle of 10 things on this post.

I want to just distill it to three core principles and it will take in your information, it will take in your customer instructions and redraw three posts.

You need to then connect it to a brand voice.

So you're going to select a brand voice through here and then you're going to hit draft post.

It's going to then link the draft posts here so you can click directly through to any linked posts.

But what it's also going to do is put the draft post directly in this new table and you can see the draft posts including any potato attachments up there.

So it's a really clever system, really powerful.

But what we're going to need to do first is make sure that we have our, open router set up.

So either you're going to set up open router and use an open router model down here, or you're going to set up and use your Gemini API key.

We're using Gemini 2.5 Pro and then a backup model of Opus 4.1.

So what triggers this is clicking that button on the scraped post to say, actually, we've given it extra instructions.

You don't have to give the custom instructions, by the way.

It will just, assume that there were no extra instructions.

You'll click draft post and it's going to run through that flow and then deliver your draft posts back here.

Once you've created those posts, it's really easy then to go to Blotato directly and actually create posts or schedule in here.

So potato is really powerful because actually you can schedule all your content from there.

If you have any questions, please drop them in the community.

I hope this is, really powerful and yeah, I'd love to hear your feedback and how you'd improve it and see some of the posts that you're generating from it.

Thanks, guys.