📈 Social Media News Intelligence Pipeline

This actor is a powerful data-gathering tool that transforms raw news from top RSS feeds (e.g., Social Media, Tech, or Marketing) into structured, actionable intelligence. It uses DuckDuckGo News Search to gather real-time context and an LLM (OpenAI) to perform advanced analysis.

This actor is designed to run on a schedule, continuously gathering fresh intelligence. The structured data it produces is intended to be consumed by our flagship actor, Content Blueprint AI, which uses this stream of data to generate ad copy, TikTok scripts, YouTube scripts, blog posts, and more.

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How to Use

You have two primary ways to use this actor:

1. As a Data Source for Content Blueprint AI: This is the primary intended use. Run this actor on a schedule to build a dataset of fresh intelligence. The Content Blueprint AI actor can then be pointed to this actor's dataset to generate its final content.
2. As a Standalone Tool: Run this actor to generate high-quality, structured news intelligence. You are free to download the resulting dataset for your own analysis, reports, or to feed into other custom workflows.

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Features

• Comprehensive Source Aggregation: Gathers news from a curated list of top-tier social media and marketing RSS feeds.
• Real-Time Grounding (DuckDuckGo): Uses the DuckDuckGo News Search to find fresh, corroborating snippets for each article, enriching the content before analysis. This helps prevent summaries based on outdated or truncated RSS data.
• Advanced AI Analysis: Leverages an LLM to analyze each article for sentiment (e.g., High Impact), categorize the topic (e.g., Platform News), and extract key entities.
• Resilient Processing: The pipeline is designed to fall back to the original RSS summary if the DuckDuckGo search fails, ensuring the run completes without crashing.
• Duplicate Prevention: Intelligently tracks processed articles across runs to ensure you only process and pay for new information.
• Cost-Saving Test Mode: Includes a test mode to run the full workflow with dummy data, allowing for development and testing without incurring API costs.

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Setup and Configuration

Before running the actor, you only need to provide an API key for the LLM service.

1. OpenAI API Key:
   • You will need an API key from your OpenAI account.

Add Keys to Apify Secrets

For security, add this key as a secret environment variable in your Apify Actor settings:

• OPENAI_API_KEY: Your OpenAI API Key.

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Cost of Usage 💸

Important Note: The costs listed below are for this actor only. Using this data with the Content Blueprint AI actor (or any other actor) will incur its own separate API and platform costs for its LLM analysis and content generation.

Costs for This Actor

1. Apify Platform Usage: Standard platform costs for running the actor, which includes the duration and complexity of the run.
2. DuckDuckGo Search: This service is free and is handled internally by the actor, replacing the Google API cost. The actor performs one search query for every article it processes.
3. OpenAI API: This is the primary cost. The actor makes two LLM calls for every article: one to summarize the DuckDuckGo Search snippets and another to perform the final analysis (sentiment, category, etc.).

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
source	String	all	The news source category to use (e.g., 'all', 'influencer-marketing-hub').
customFeedUrl	String	null	A custom RSS feed URL to use if source is set to custom.
maxArticles	Integer	20	The maximum number of new articles to fetch and process in a single run.
region	String	wt-wt	Region to limit search results by (e.g., 'us-en' for US, 'wt-wt' for World).
timeLimit	String	w	Limit search results by time (e.g., 'd' for day, 'w' for week).
runTestMode	Boolean	false	Bypasses all external API calls for zero-cost testing. Do not enable in production.

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Output

The actor saves its results in the dataset. This dataset is the intended input for the Content Blueprint AI actor. Each item is a structured JSON object with the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
source	String	The name of the news source (e.g., 'Influencer Marketing Hub').
title	String	The original title of the news article.
url	String	The URL of the original article.
published	String	The publication date string from the RSS feed.
summary	String	The AI-generated summary of the article.
sentiment	String	The AI-analyzed impact (e.g., High Impact, Medium Impact).
category	String	The AI-assigned category (e.g., Platform News, Strategy/Trends).
key_entities	Array of Strings	A list of key entities like companies, platforms, or concepts mentioned.