Automate Real Estate Social Media Content with Canva and AI — Part 2

This is Part 2 of building a complete AI content automation system for real estate social media. In Part 1, I walked through how to set up the Canva brand template and connect it to Make.com so the automation can generate images. Now we’re adding the caption layer — ChatGPT writes the copy, the automation attaches it to the images, and the whole thing gets posted to Facebook.

By the end of this two-part series, you’ll have a system that generates five branded social media posts — graphics and captions — with a single button click.

What We Built in Part 1

Quick recap: in Part 1, we set up a Canva brand template with two data fields — a title and a body. We connected Make.com to Canva via API so an automation can push text content into those fields and export a finished graphic. The output was images generated on demand, uploaded to Google Drive.

What we didn’t add yet was AI-written content. In Part 1, the content was still manual — we were proving the image generation pipeline worked. This video completes the loop.

Adding ChatGPT to the Workflow

The first module in the updated automation is an OpenAI call. The prompt tells ChatGPT to create five Instagram posts around a specific niche topic.

My current niche is new construction in Austin, so the prompt is: create five Instagram posts with tips on buying new construction in Austin. Keep the title under 55 characters and the body under 230 characters. Return the results as a JSON object.

That character limit instruction is critical. The Canva template has fixed-size text boxes. If a title runs 80 characters, it will overflow and wreck the graphic. When you constrain the output in the prompt, Canva’s output stays clean.

Equally important is the JSON return format. In Make.com’s OpenAI module, change the response format setting to “JSON object.” When ChatGPT returns a properly structured JSON, Make.com can parse it and route each post as a separate item through the rest of the automation. Without that setting, you get JSON-looking text that the parser chokes on.

Here’s what the output looks like in the Google Sheet after parsing:

Post 1: “Buying New Construction in Austin” / “Thinking about a brand new home in Austin? Over the next few posts, I’ll share insider tips to help you avoid surprises, save money, and love your new build.”
Post 2, 3, 4, 5 in the same structure

Five rows, ready to go.

From Google Sheet to Canva Graphics

After the JSON is parsed and written to the sheet, the automation reads each row and sends the title and body to Canva via the same API setup we built in Part 1.

Canva takes each set of content, populates the brand template, and exports the graphic. The exported files go to Google Drive.

The export format matters: Facebook and Instagram currently require JPEG. Canva can export PNG, PDF, and other formats, but for this social posting workflow, JPEG is the one that works reliably downstream. Set the export format explicitly in the Make.com module — don’t leave it as default.

At the end of this step, you have five images in Google Drive with the corresponding captions stored in the Google Sheet. Five posts, ready to review.

The Review and Approve Step

The automation doesn’t auto-post immediately. There’s a status column in the Google Sheet — each row starts at “Review.”

I take 30 seconds to look at the Canva preview links, confirm the images look on-brand, and change the status to “Approved.” This is a simple quality control gate that keeps me from auto-publishing something that came out wrong.

For agents who want a fully hands-off setup, you could theoretically skip this step and just let everything post automatically. I don’t recommend it. AI-generated content occasionally produces something awkward or generic enough that you wouldn’t want your name on it. The 30-second review is worth keeping.

Posting to Facebook as a Carousel

Once posts are approved, a second automation in Make.com handles the publishing step.

It reads all rows with “Approved” status, pulls the Google Drive links for each image, and uses Make.com’s Facebook module to create a carousel post. The carousel bundles all five images into a single post with the AI-written caption.

Carousel posts perform better than single-image posts on Facebook. Multiple images mean more swiping, more time on your post, and stronger engagement signals. For real estate content — tips, market updates, buyer advice — carousel format gives you room to develop an idea across slides instead of cramming it into one image.

The caption for the post can be pulled from any of the five rows — typically I use the first post’s body as the overall caption, since it sets the theme for the whole carousel.

What the Final Output Looks Like

After running the full automation, my Facebook feed shows a carousel post with five images. Each one has a title (hook) and body text, styled consistently with my brand colors and layout. The caption invites engagement and includes my contact information.

The whole process — from clicking the trigger button to a live Facebook post — takes about two minutes. Most of that is Make.com processing time, not my time.

Organic social media leads are genuinely worth pursuing. From my own experience, leads that come in through content convert at five to ten times the rate of paid advertising leads. That’s not a theoretical ratio — it’s what I’ve seen in my own business. The problem is that creating five consistent, on-brand posts every week manually is hard to sustain.

This automation makes it easy to sustain.

The Upcoming Additions

The goal for this series was to generate 60 posts for 30 days — two posts a day — with one click at the beginning of each month. We’re close.

The remaining steps are:

Adding personal branding to the Canva template (my photo and contact info on every graphic)
Building a scheduling integration so the 60 posts go out automatically over 30 days instead of all at once

For the scheduling piece, I’ll connect Make.com to the Facebook scheduling API and the Instagram scheduling API so posts go out at set times each day.

The access to this full workflow — the Make.com scenario files, the ChatGPT prompt, the Canva template setup — is available for free in the Real Estate AI Society community. There’s a link on the newsletter page to join.

If you’d rather skip the build and use a ready-to-go app version of this, I’m building that too. It’s currently in private beta with a waitlist.

For more on the AI tools that power this workflow — ChatGPT, Canva, Make.com — see the tools page.