So everyone knows that social media is all the rage and Meta changed Instagram’s algorithm to place more emphasis on carousels because their last update shifted too much emphasis on reels. You didn’t know this? Sweet, you just got some free knowledge! I noticed that when I am doing social media I tend to always get lost in creation mode and never really have any consistency, and I have huge gaps between my posts because of this. The problem I have is I am a nobody to the algorithm and no one follows or sees me because of my lack of consistency.
Being a business owner I had to change my mindset to if I am not working on a client project or working to acquire a new client I am losing money. What I noticed from this shift was pretty dramatic (no really, just wait). I realized that I spend way too much time playing with AI and SaaS programs and don’t actually produce anything that I could sell or acquire a client with. Then it hit me- Why not use AI to make 6 months of carousel posts, schedule them, and create consistency at once? Best of all, I would only have to do this twice a year… As Barney Stinson would say, “Challenge Accepted!”
I created a stack (or workflow) that made AI do 95% of the work and I just copied and pasted the results. Now to be fair, I did have to train the AIs to get the exact outputs I wanted, but the results were 1000% worth that extra work. The entire workflow was ChatGPT, Google Sheets, Canva, Jasper.ai, and heropost.io. Let's do this!
Step 1: Create the posts
I went to ChatGPT and entered this prompt:
I want you to be a digital marketing expert. I want to create 100 carousel Instagram posts about {your niche} using the top 100 searches about {your niche} with 5 slides about each question. I need this to be in table form including subtext for each of the 5 items pertaining to the 100 questions. I also need a sentence explaining each subtopic in the table as well in the same row so that every question is its own row.
This is what people are calling a Super Prompt or high-efficiency prompt. It gives specific instructions on what you want it to do and how you want it printed out. As you see you will get a table printed out. Copy and paste that into a Google sheet (or Excel). If it ran 100 rows then you are golden, but sometimes chatGPT likes to be quirky. It stopped around 30 table rows for me. If you need more rows give it this command:
Add 5 new unused questions to the table, please.
You will get 5 new rows and you can copy and paste to your spreadsheet. Repeat this process until you have about 100 rows in your table. I want you to have 100 rows before you stop. Save the file as a CSV and we are ready for step 2!
The thought process: A year has 52 weeks so you just about made 100 posts, which is 2 per week for an entire year (3 weeks have major holidays when you generally have specialty posts running instead of regularly scheduled items).
Step 2: Chose a Template & Connect Data
Go to Canva, and I strongly encourage you to have the pro version (the difference in template quality is massive). Once you are logged in click on Instagram Post (square) and then you can search from there. I found a great template by searching "business information carousel template". I was looking for simplistic and easy-to-read, but find something that fits your brand and niche. Once you found that and have added all the pages this is where the magic starts.
On the left menu, you are going to click on apps and then search BULK. It will return an icon that says Bulk Create. Click on that icon and click the upload CSV you see at the bottom. Find your data sheet from step 1 and get that loaded.
Step 3: Make The Slides
Now that you have your data connected it's time to tell Canva where you want the columns to fit on each slide. You place each item by clicking on a text box and clicking Connect Data. It will open a submenu that has your titles from your CSV sheet and you just choose where you want it to be. Repeat this process until you see a purple checkmark next to each data source you have.
Once you know that your data is connected you will click the purple Continue button at the bottom of the toolbar. You can now check the select all option under Apply Data and click the purple Generate pages. Boom, you just made your carousels! Download the entire set as .png files so you can upload it to any form of social media.
Pro Tip: When you see all the images I would make sure to title your first slide so you know where each ends. I titled mine {page #}- {carouselTitle} (example: 1- what is digital marketing?). This will make your life so much easier when going to schedule in just a minute.
Step 4: Create Captions
I added a column to my original sheet that I called captions (I’m super creative– I know). I then went to Jasper.ai (this is my absolute favorite AI writer because it does literally EVERYTHING). You need to get Boss mode because it absolutely crushes any competition and it lets you use the template mode called Photo Post Captions which is about to blow your mind.
All you have to do is copy the question from the table into the input for "What is your post about", change your tone (you can make it witty, smart, or professional), output language, and click generate. By default, you get 3 awesome captions to choose from, but you can increase the amount (5 is the most I ever need at a time). Click on the copy icon and paste it into your sheet and repeat for you 100 questions. This will take about 30 minutes for all 100 questions.
PRO TIP: If you get ones that really hit well make sure to both star and like because it will train Jasper to write more like that. I’m telling you this process alone would take days if you had to do this manually, and the quality of the outputs is going to get interactions.
Step 5: Schedule Those Posts!
I used heropost.io because that was the most economical option about 2 years ago when I started really doing social media posting and management for clients. Recently Apphi and other big names have emerged, so use what you are comfortable with.
I select the media channels I am going to post to (usually Facebook & Instagram for carousels) and then choose my images for the post. I then copy the captions I created from Jasper and then it's on to the hashtag cloud to finish the post.
I try and keep everything as consistent as possible so for hashtag groups I always go to best-hashtags.com. They continually update the most used hashtags and filter out ones that Instagram is blacklisting. You can usually find excellent groups of 30 hashtags based on your niche (30 is Instagram’s limit per post) so find one group you really like and save it somewhere.
Now that we have the hashtag cloud we want we can now copy and paste it below the captions for each post. From here it's just selecting your schedule for every post. This pattern is totally up to you since everyone has a different product cycle. Just make sure you fit your brand and keep it consistent.
PRO TIP: I am trying to set up 3 postings a week (Monday for marketing, Wednesday for SEO, and Friday for Web Design), and most Social Media managers would agree that is sufficient. Your goal with this process was to get as many posts consistently scheduled so never lose that goal.
Conclusion
Ok, so you just spent about 3-4 hours doing this. Chances are that set you up until the middle of January. You just created consistency that you probably have never had and you only had to do the work once. Now you just have to repeat this process 2 times a year and probably saved yourself days of work that you can direct back to clients.
