Create Newsletters & Social Posts from YouTube with OpenAI (n8n)

Turn any YouTube video into a newsletter + social posts using OpenAI in n8n

This n8n workflow takes a YouTube URL (via webhook), grabs or accepts the transcript, then uses the OpenAI Chat Completions API to generate a complete newsletter issue plus repurposed content for X (Twitter) and LinkedIn—returning both structured JSON and ready-to-publish Markdown.

What this workflow does

• Receives a POST webhook request containing a url field (and optionally a transcript).
• Validates and extracts the YouTube video ID from the provided URL and errors if the URL is invalid.
• Obtains the transcript: uses the provided transcript if included; otherwise fetches captions from youtubetranscript.com and converts them into plain text.
• Generates content with OpenAI: sends the transcript to the OpenAI Chat Completions API to produce a strict-JSON payload with newsletter sections, takeaways, an X thread, a LinkedIn post, and a call to action.
• Parses and normalizes the output: ensures expected fields exist and adds basic fallbacks if the response is not valid JSON.
• Builds a Markdown newsletter from the generated content and returns the full result to the webhook caller as a JSON response.

Use cases

• SaaS operators repurpose product demos and updates into newsletter issues and social posts.
• Automation engineers build a repeatable pipeline for converting video content into structured marketing assets.
• Content teams generate consistent X (Twitter) threads and LinkedIn posts from long-form YouTube interviews.

Technical details

• Webhook to accept input (url, optional transcript)
• Code for video ID extraction, JSON parsing/normalization, and Markdown assembly
• HTTP request to call OpenAI and (when needed) youtubetranscript.com
• Respond to webhook with structured JSON output

Set up by adding your OpenAI API key in the HTTP request Authorization header, activate the workflow, and POST your YouTube url to generate newsletter + social content on demand.