Use AI to Turn Longform Content into Social Posts

I'm the first to admit: I'm skeptical about AI when it comes to writing. Probably because — as a writer — I have yet to see it come close to the type of work I do.

But I'll also admit that a lot of the work after creating a longform piece of content (like on Substack or Medium) is repetitive. I'll usually turn one article into a few social posts. Often, I'm taking lines directly from the article or tweaking them only slightly to fit the platform.

The hard work has already been done in crafting the original content. Now I can use AI to speed up the rest.

My favorite platform for generating social post ideas from my longform content is Writer. Specifically, Ask Writer, which is a free tool that allows you to drop in a link to published content.

Step 1: Launch Ask Writer

Go to ask.writer.com. You'll see a bunch of ideas like "Write 5 FAQs for this article." My favorite is "Summarize this article into 3 key takeaways."

You can click on one of the provided prompts, or write your own.

Step 2: Drop in the URL

At the bottom, you'll see the prompt you select (or typed in) and you'll add the URL to your published work. I used this article in my example.

Then you'll click on the "Ask Writer" button.

Writer will generate the output. I probably won't use these exactly as written, but they're pretty good. They reflect some of the main ideas from my article. I might even use the third one as-is.

Step 3: Copy the output to your content planning tool

I use Trello to plan my social media content. Whenever I publish a longform article, I have a card in Trello reminding me to repurpose that content on a future date.

I'll drop in the text I copied over from Writer. When I'm ready to schedule these social media posts, my inspiration is waiting for me!

If you're not using a tool to plan your social media content, dropping the Writer output in a Word doc would also work — anything that you can revisit later.

Other Resources:

• I wrote a whole thing for Buffer about automating your content repurposing efforts — check it out!
• If you're a creator, your marketing plan matters. Here's why.
• Ready for a deeper dive? Here's an eBook about creating a content library.