Automating Posting (Not Writing) With n8n, What We Learned

Hey, it’s Anum & Fatima here again 👋

Welcome to the fifth edition of our newsletter! Thanks for reading, it means the world to us.

For those who are new, we’re sisters, software engineers, and builders at heart. A few months ago, we started building in public, sharing our journey through content. But here’s the thing: as much as we value marketing and personal branding, we always want more time for what we love most: building and coding.

So we asked ourselves: how do we protect our time for building while still showing up online consistently?

The answer wasn’t to outsource or let AI write for us (we’re intentional about writing everything ourselves, only using AI to refine). Instead, we looked for tasks around content where automation could save us hours.

And we found two use cases:

You’ve probably seen those automations where you type a word in comments / DMs and instantly get a link. We set this up using n8n, so now when someone requests a link on Instagram, they get it automatically. For now, this is just for Instagram since on X and LinkedIn we can share links directly.

We were manually posting the same content across platforms: short posts on X, Threads, plus relatively longer posts on Instagram and Threads. Now we’ve built two dashboards in Notion:

Note: We can also set community ID to send post in community on X.

Now we just write the content once, attach images / videos to Cloudinary, set a date and time, and our n8n workflow handles the rest: posting on all platforms and even sending us a Slack message once it’s live.

It took some effort to build these automations, but honestly, they save us a huge amount of time (and headaches).

Now, instead of juggling posts, we can use that time to:

We’re not handing over our voice to AI, but we are making the distribution process as efficient as possible. Eventually, we may train AI to refine content in our style, but we won’t rely on it to write from scratch for our personal brand.

For daily updates or to connect with us about building a similar workflow, find us on Instagram: @inthelinesofcode

Talk soon,

🥷 Anum & Fatima 👩‍🎨

P.S. We love meeting people online! Hit reply and tell us who you are, what you do (whether it’s one sentence or your whole story). We read every reply.