You follow a dozen industry sites and newsletters, read them in the evening, and once in a while manage a post along the lines of “here’s what’s happening in our space”. There’s no shortage of material. It just reaches your feed every other week, because opening, summarising and finding an image takes longer than the post is worth.
RSS solves half of that job: fresh material from every source lands in one place on its own. The other half, what you do with it next, is what separates a useful channel from a link dump. Below: where feeds hide in 2026, three levels of automation from “reposter” to “radar with drafts”, why raw link posting kills reach on X and Instagram, and how to build a pipeline that doesn’t look like a bot.
RSS is alive, just hidden
The orange RSS buttons disappeared years ago, but the feeds are still almost everywhere. Where to look:
| Source | Feed address |
|---|---|
| WordPress site (most media and blogs) | site/feed/ or site/category/name/feed/ |
| YouTube channel | youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<ID> |
| Substack, Medium | newsletter.substack.com/feed, medium.com/feed/@author |
reddit.com/r/subreddit/.rss | |
| Google News for a query | news.google.com/rss/search?q=query&hl=en |
| Public Telegram channel | No native RSS; you need a bridge like RSSHub or RSS-Bridge, or a tool that reads channels directly |
If the address isn’t obvious, view the page source and search for application/rss+xml; the feed link sits right there. If there’s nothing, most aggregators (Feedly, Inoreader) can follow a site without a feed by watching the page for changes.
A good starting set is 5–7 sources, not 30. Two or three industry outlets, your main competitor’s blog, a supplier or regulator, one source from another market, one YouTube channel. More than that and the feed becomes the same unread tab, only automated.
Three levels of automation
The difference between them isn’t the tooling. It’s who writes the post text.
| Level | What it does | Tools | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Reposter | Headline + link straight to the channel | IFTTT, Zapier, Make, dlvr.it, Telegram RSS bots | News aggregators, internal team channels |
| 2. Drafts | AI reads the piece and proposes a post in your voice; you approve | Make + an LLM, Idea Feed in Repost21 | Brands and experts who need a voice |
| 3. Radar | Same, plus topic filters and several angles per item | Tools with an idea feed and a brand knowledge base | Anyone running 3+ platforms |
Level 1 takes 20 minutes and costs nothing: Zapier’s free plan gives 100 tasks a month, Make’s gives 1,000 operations. For an “industry news” channel that’s plenty. For a brand, level 1 is almost always a mistake, and here’s why.
Why raw link posting doesn’t work
Platforms suppress link posts. X openly downranks posts with external links: a “headline + URL” post gets a fraction of the views of the same text without the link. LinkedIn behaves similarly. Instagram’s official API won’t publish a post without a photo or video at all, and links in captions aren’t clickable. Of the six networks worth posting to, only Telegram and Threads are relaxed about links.
Followers spot the bot. Thirty identical “Read: [headline]” posts a week, and people mute you. Worse, if the same headlines go to X, Threads and Telegram word for word, you now run three copies of one bot. How to repackage material per platform is in the cross-posting guide.
No take, no value. Everyone has the link to the news. Your value is what you think about it and what it means for the reader.
Where a reposter is fine: a private team channel (“what’s being written about us and competitors”), an aggregator in a narrow niche where links are the product, and a Telegram channel for jobs or deals.
Building the RSS → drafts pipeline
Step by step, whatever tool you use:
- Pick your sources, the 5–7 from the first section. For each, write down why it’s useful to your reader: “TechCrunch covers funding rounds in our category”, “the competitor publishes case studies with numbers”.
- Add a keyword filter. A media feed with 40 items a day should yield 3–5 for you. A filter on 10–15 words from your niche (“marketplace”, “compliance”, “HoReCa”) drops the rest. In Make and Zapier this is a standard step; in tools with an idea feed it’s a source setting.
- Define three angles per item. Not “summarise the news”, but concrete formats:
- Digest: “Three things in Shopify’s quarterly report that matter if you sell on it: …”
- Take: “Instagram changed its API limits again. For small businesses it’s mostly good news, and here’s why.”
- Breakdown: “A competitor launched a $29 subscription. Let’s check whether their unit economics add up.”
- Give the AI brand context. Without it, drafts come out equally smooth and equally empty. The minimum is a paragraph on “who we are, who we write for, what we never say”. In Repost21 that’s the brand knowledge base: connect a Google Doc or Notion page and Luna writes with your wording in mind.
- Schedule a review slot. Morning, 15 minutes: open the feed, approve 2–3 drafts, send them to the calendar’s best slots, delete the rest. Without a fixed ritual the pipeline piles up drafts nobody reads.
- Review sources monthly. A source that produced zero approved drafts in a month gets switched off.
How the Idea Feed does this inside Repost21 is described in the Idea Feed post, and the technical side of connecting sources is in the docs.
Ready-made scenarios per platform
Telegram: the weekly digest. Five items of the week, two sentences each, the link after the text rather than instead of it. Example lead-in: “What happened in e-commerce this week and what it means for you”. Schedule it for Monday morning; how to schedule channel posts is in the step-by-step guide.
X: the opinion thread. First post is a thesis with no link (“The new ad-labelling rules hit micro-businesses harder than agencies”), 3–4 posts of argument, the source link in the last post. That way the first tweet keeps its reach.
Threads: the short reaction. One paragraph, conversational, a question at the end. Threads tolerates links, but it lives on replies, not on news.
Instagram: the five-news carousel. Once a week. First slide “5 industry news items this week”, one slide per item, last slide “save so you don’t have to search”. You’ll have to make the image: the API won’t accept a post without media.
One item → four different posts. Not copies, but different formats, each going to its own platform in its own slot. If ideas still run dry, there are 30 evergreen formats that work without a news hook.
When this will NOT work
- In a niche without decent sources. If your industry lives in private chats and at conferences rather than in media, the feed stays half-empty. Then keep sources “around” the niche: regulators, adjacent markets, foreign equivalents.
- When nobody’s there to approve. Levels 2 and 3 assume a human in the morning. Without one, either go back to level 1 in a private channel, or accept that only evergreen content from the calendar gets published.
- For accounts that grow on personality. An expert’s personal brand lives on stories and opinions. News belongs there at most one post in five, otherwise the account turns into a news outlet.
- With AI and no context. A draft “based on the news” with no brand knowledge is a retelling that any regular reader will spot. Either supply the context or edit by hand.
RSS won’t replace the idea or the voice. It removes the part of the work where you cycle through ten tabs trying to remember what was worth writing about. If you want to try level 2 without wiring up Make scenarios, Repost21 connects sources in a couple of minutes and Luna’s drafts are waiting in the Idea Feed by morning; the free plan is enough for that.