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90 Days Of
Content Strategy
From Real Data

Scrape your competitors’ posts. Transcribe their videos. Hand it all to Claude. Walk away with what’s already working in your niche, what nobody is touching, and a 90-day content calendar built from real engagement data, not vibes.

Most creators waste their best hours staring at a blank doc trying to invent ideas. Your next series is already public. The hits are in your competitors’ top posts, and the gaps are in what they keep missing. You just need a way to read it at scale.

Claude can’t pull posts from Instagram, TikTok or YouTube by itself. Apify can. It grabs the posts, captions, engagement numbers and transcripts from 5 to 10 accounts, and Claude does the analysis.

Content creator Marc Rutten used Apify’s Instagram Scraper to show brands why their big follower and like counts weren’t turning into sales. This is the same idea, tuned for creators and small business owners running their own content.

The Workflow

First time through, block about 90 minutes. After that it goes much faster because everything is set up.

01

Sign up for Apify

Create a free account at apify.com. No credit card. The Free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which resets each cycle and covers a small run like this one. (Apify pricing)

02

Pick your competitors with Claude

Get the list right before you spend a cent. This prompt checks your picks, adds direct and adjacent accounts, and hands you the final 8 in the exact format Apify wants.

Competitor Picker
You are my content strategist. Help me pick the right 8 competitors to scrape for my Gap Finder run. The wrong ones waste my Apify credit and give me a useless analysis. The right ones show me the real opportunities in my niche. My inputs: - My niche in one sentence: [e.g. "AI education for non-technical professionals"] - Platforms I post on: [Instagram / TikTok / YouTube / LinkedIn] - My follower count and average engagement: [NUMBERS] - 3 creators or brands I know I want analyzed: [HANDLES] - My 90-day goal: [followers / leads / sales / authority / saves / shares] - One angle I want to own that nobody does well yet: [DESCRIBE OR "NOT SURE YET"] Do five things. 1. Check my 3 picks. For each, tell me if they're a good account to study (audience size, actually posting in my niche, engaged audience). If one is weak, replace it and say why. 2. Add 3 direct competitors in my exact niche, at my size or one tier above. For each: handle, approximate follower count, why they're on the list, and what seems to be working for them. 3. Add 2 adjacent creators whose audience overlaps with mine but who aren't direct competitors. For each: handle, the overlap, and the content style I could borrow. 4. Give me the final 8 as a clean list I can paste into Apify: full profile URLs for Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/username/), plain usernames for TikTok, channel URLs for YouTube. 5. For each of the 8, write one question I should answer once I have their data (e.g. "Do @username's best posts skew talking-head or screen recording?"). Rules: search the web to confirm each account exists and is active, and mark follower counts as approximate. Never invent a handle. If my niche is too broad to analyze, push me to narrow it first.

03

Optional shortcut: connect Apify to Claude

Apify has a Claude connector. Search "Apify" in the connector directory, or add a custom connector with the URL https://mcp.apify.com, then sign in to Apify. Now you can ask Claude to run the scrapers below for you. It works in claude.ai and the desktop app. (Apify’s setup steps)

04

Scrape Instagram

Open apify/instagram-scraper. Paste each competitor’s profile URL into Instagram URLs, set Results limit per URL to 30 and click Start. You get the caption, hashtags, likes, comments, views, URL and timestamp for every post.

Cost: on the Free plan it’s $0.0027 per result, so 8 accounts at 30 posts each (240 posts) is about $0.65.

05

Scrape TikTok

Open clockworks/tiktok-scraper. Add the usernames under Usernames, set Number of videos per hashtag, profile or search to 30, and turn on Subtitles & Transcription so you get the words, not just the caption.

Cost: about $0.0037 per video on the Free plan, plus extra for transcription. Always cap the number of videos so one run can’t eat your whole credit.

06

Scrape YouTube

If anyone on your list has a channel, use streamers/youtube-scraper. Paste channel URLs into Direct URLs, cap the results, and use its Transcription & subtitles option for transcripts. About $0.004 per video on the Free plan.

07

Transcribe the top Reels and grab comments

Captions are the wrapper. The video is the product, so get the words. Paste the URLs of each competitor’s top Reels into invideoiq/video-transcriber ($0.035 per video). On the Free plan it transcribes 3 videos per run, so do your 3 best per account.

Then run the top posts through apify/instagram-comment-scraper. The comments are where people ask for what nobody is making.

08

Export and upload to Claude

In each Apify dataset, click Export and download a CSV. In Claude, make a project called "Gap Finder," and add every CSV to the project files. Keep code execution on (Settings, then Capabilities) so Claude can actually crunch the numbers.

09

Run the Gap Finder prompt

This is the deliverable the whole workflow was built for. Patterns to ride, gaps to own, a 12-piece calendar with hooks and a sharper positioning line, all tied to real posts.

The Gap Finder
You are my senior content strategist. Read every file I've uploaded to this project (Apify exports of my competitors' posts, transcripts and comments) and hand me a content strategy backed by real engagement data, not vibes. Read the data before you write anything, and cite specific posts as evidence. The files (some may be missing; work with what's there and tell me what's absent): - Instagram posts: caption, hashtags, likes, comments, views, post URL, timestamp, owner username - TikTok posts: caption, plays, likes, comments, shares, hashtags, URL, plus subtitles or transcripts if I turned them on - YouTube videos: title, views, duration, upload date, channel, plus transcripts if I turned them on - Instagram transcripts for each competitor's top Reels - Comments from the top posts My context: - Niche: [PASTE] - Platforms: [PASTE] - Followers and engagement: [PASTE] - 90-day goal: [followers / leads / sales / authority / saves / shares] - Off-limits topics or brands: [PASTE OR "NONE"] - My voice in 3 words: [PASTE] Produce six numbered sections. 1. ENGAGEMENT BASELINE. For each competitor: average likes, comments and views, and engagement relative to follower count where you have it. Their top 5 posts by raw numbers and by ratio. Rank competitors by engagement health, not size, and name the one punching above their weight. 2. 10 PATTERNS THAT WORK. Patterns that show up across several competitors' top posts. For each: a name, the format, the hook (quote real opening lines from transcripts), 3 example post URLs from my data, why it works, and a 1-10 confidence score that it fits my voice and goal. Rank by confidence. 3. 5 GAPS NOBODY IS TOUCHING. For each: the topic, the evidence it's a gap (questions in the comments, topics with high engagement but few posts), my angle, 3 first posts with one-line hooks, and a confidence score. 4. WHAT THE COMMENTS ARE ASKING FOR. The 3 most common questions in the comments that competitors haven't answered with follow-up content. Only use comments in my files; if I didn't upload any, say so and skip this. 5. 90-DAY CALENDAR. 12 pieces, one a week: 8 that ride patterns from section 2 and 4 that own gaps from section 3. For each: week, platform, working title and hook, format, the competitor posts it's inspired by (URLs), what makes mine different, and the one metric that tells me it worked. 6. SHARPER POSITIONING. One sentence for my bio based on what's crowded and what's missing, plus 3 variations to test. Rules: plain, direct English, no buzzwords. Only cite URLs and quotes that are actually in my files; never make up examples. If the data is thin, say so. Push back on my off-limits list if the data says I'm leaving something on the table. End with one blunt paragraph: the one thing I should stop doing based on this data, with the numbers behind it.

Run It Once A Quarter

One run gives you 90 days of direction. Four a year and you have a content engine that compounds. The first run is the hard one, so block 90 minutes this weekend.

Once you have your ideas, pair them with Stop using AI to post more, start using AI to post better for the writing voice rules, and 10 Claude Connectors to get the content out the door faster.