RSS to Social with Claude + Make

A volunteer-run dark-sky park keeps a blog and follows three astronomy news feeds. They want to share the good stuff with their followers, but nobody on the team has time to check feeds and write captions every day. So the channels go quiet for weeks.

This build keeps them active. Make watches the feeds you choose. When a new article appears, Claude writes a short caption in your voice, and Make queues it to your socials through Buffer. You approve the queue when you have a minute. The feeds do the finding; Claude does the wording.

This is the curation cousin of our blog-to-social guide. There, your own new post is the trigger. Here, any feed is, so you can share sources you trust without writing every caption yourself. We wire it in Make.

What does this workflow actually do?

In one line: a new feed item becomes a queued social post. Make watches an RSS feed. When a new article shows up, it hands the title and summary to Claude, Claude writes a caption, and Make queues it in Buffer. You review before anything posts.

A few real cases, none of them the usual ones:

• The dark-sky park above, sharing astronomy news without a daily scramble.
• A specialty coffee roaster who follows green-coffee market feeds and wants the relevant headlines on X for fellow nerds.
• A school librarian curating a few book-news feeds into a steady stream for the library’s account.
• A regional trail alliance following land-use and conservation feeds, sharing what matters to members.

Finding good links is easy when a feed does it for you. Writing a caption for each one is the part that stalls. Claude takes that part.

Why use Make if Claude can already write?

Fair question. Claude is good at turning a headline and summary into a caption that sounds like you. It is not built to poll feeds around the clock, dedupe items, and queue posts. That is plumbing, and Make handles plumbing.

Make does the steps with no judgment: watching the feed, catching each new item, queuing it, running on a schedule. Claude does the one step that needs a voice, the caption. Think of Make as the wire and Claude as the writer on the end of it. They split the job; neither replaces the other.

What do you need before you start?

• A Make account. The free 1,000 operations a month is plenty for a few feeds.
• A Claude API key from the console, not the chat app. See how to use Claude.
• A Buffer account with the channels you want to post to.
• One or more RSS feed URLs. Most blogs and news sites have one; add /feed to many site URLs to find it.

Two Make words. A scenario is the whole RSS-to-Buffer automation. A module is one box. Three boxes, one scenario.

How does the workflow work, step by step?

Three modules, left to right:

Module	App	What it does
1. Trigger	RSS	Watches a feed and fires on each new item
2. Brain	Claude	Writes a caption from the item’s title and summary
3. Output	Buffer	Queues the caption to your channels for approval

Step 1: Watch an RSS feed

Create a scenario and add RSS, Watch RSS feed items. Paste the feed URL and set how many recent items to pull while testing. This trigger hands the next step each item’s title, summary, and link.

Step 2: Let Claude write the caption

Add a Claude module, choose Create a Prompt, paste your API key, and pick Sonnet. A prompt that works:

Write a short social caption for this article.
Title: {{title from Step 1}}
Summary: {{summary from Step 1}}
Link: {{link from Step 1}}

Under 240 characters. Say why it is worth a reader's time in your
own words, not the article's. End with the link. No hashtag spam.

Map the tokens in from Step 1 so each item fills them automatically.

Step 3: Queue it in Buffer

Add Buffer, Create a status update, connect Buffer, choose your channel, and map Claude’s caption plus the link. Use add to queue so you approve each one. Always keep a human between a feed and your followers, so a bad or off-topic item never posts itself.

How do you run it and check the result?

Click Run once. Make grabs a recent item, Claude captions it, and it lands in your Buffer queue. Read it. In my testing the captions were usable after I told Claude to write in my words rather than echo the article’s summary, which it leaned on at first. Adjust the prompt, then turn the scenario on with a 15-minute schedule.

From there your channels stay alive on their own. You move from writing captions to approving them, which for a few feeds is a couple of minutes a day.

What does this cost to run?

Piece	Free tier	If you outgrow it
Make	1,000 operations/month free	Core plan from about $9/month
Claude API	Pay per use	A short caption costs a fraction of a cent
Buffer	Free plan covers a few channels	Paid from about $6/channel/month
RSS	Free	Free

Each item is three Make operations and a sliver of Claude. Watch your feed volume: a firehose feed can eat operations fast, so start with a few good feeds. More on tiers in our Make guide.

What can go wrong, and how do you avoid it?

• It posts low-quality items. A noisy feed means noisy captions. Pick feeds you trust, and keep the Buffer review step.
• You hit your operation limit. High-volume feeds burn operations. Limit how many items each run pulls.
• Captions echo the article instead of adding value. Tell Claude to write in your words, the fix that mattered most in testing.
• Duplicate posts. If the same item reappears, add a filter or a small data store to remember what you have already shared.

The same three-box shape powers a lot of builds. See more in Make AI scenarios.

How do you build this in Zapier or n8n instead?

Same three jobs, different names.

Job	Make	Zapier	n8n
Catch a feed item	Watch RSS feed items	RSS by Zapier trigger	RSS Feed Trigger node
Write the caption	Claude module	Claude (Anthropic) action	Anthropic node
Queue to social	Buffer status update	Buffer action	Buffer node

Make and Zapier are easiest to start. n8n is the self-hosting pick. Full comparison: Zapier vs Make vs n8n.

Frequently asked questions

Where do I find a feed’s RSS URL?

Many sites add /feed or /rss to the main URL. Browser extensions can detect feeds too. Most blogs and news sites still publish one.

Can I watch more than one feed?

Yes. Run a separate scenario per feed, or use a feed aggregator that combines several into one URL.

Will it share paywalled or junk articles?

It shares whatever the feed contains, which is why you pick good feeds and keep the review step in Buffer.

Do I need to credit the source?

Always include the link, which the prompt does. Sharing a headline with a link is normal practice; copying full articles is not.

Is this the same as my own blog auto-posting?

No. For your own posts, use the blog-to-social build. This one is for curating other feeds.

Sources and official docs

• RSS module (Make Help)
• Claude API overview (Anthropic)
• Buffer Help Center
• RSS 2.0 specification
• RSS — Grokipedia

Last reviewed: May 2026. Make, Claude, and Buffer update their interfaces; verify button names on the official pages.

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