n8n Webhook: Turn YouTube Transcripts into Newsletter & Social Posts

Turn any YouTube transcript into a newsletter + social posts—automatically

This n8n workflow receives a YouTube URL (or an optional transcript) via webhook, pulls the transcript, uses OpenAI Chat Completions to generate a full newsletter issue and repurposed content for X (Twitter) and LinkedIn, and returns both structured JSON and a ready-to-send Markdown draft.

What this workflow does

• Receives a POST webhook request containing a url field for the YouTube video and optionally a transcript.
• Extracts and validates the YouTube video ID from the provided URL.
• Fetches the transcript from youtubetranscript.com when no transcript is supplied, or uses your provided transcript if included.
• Calls OpenAI Chat Completions with the transcript and strict instructions to output strict JSON for newsletter and social repurposing.
• Parses and normalizes the AI response into structured fields such as subject line, sections, takeaways, an X thread, a LinkedIn post, and a call to action.
• Builds a Markdown newsletter draft and returns everything as a JSON response to the webhook caller.

Use cases

• Generate a weekly newsletter issue from a YouTube talk and publish it as Markdown in your CMS pipeline.
• Repurpose a single video transcript into an X (Twitter) thread and a LinkedIn post without manual rewriting.
• Automate content ops for SaaS teams by triggering newsletter creation from a URL link and receiving clean JSON for downstream publishing.

Technical details

• Webhook to accept POST requests (via n8n webhook trigger).
• Code for YouTube ID extraction, input validation, and response normalization.
• HTTP Request to fetch transcripts from youtubetranscript.com when needed.
• OpenAI Chat Completions to generate newsletter + social content as strict JSON.
• Respond to Webhook to return structured JSON and the Markdown draft.

Setup note: Provide your OpenAI API key (e.g., in the HTTP request Authorization header) or use an n8n OpenAI credential-based node, then activate the webhook and send JSON with a url (and optional transcript).