How I’m using automation to auto-publish to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
About this Article
In a recent article about generating featured images inside of WordPress, I made mention of how Inbound Now is using Zapier to auto published our latest posts to our social profiles. This generated some additional questions from our readers, like, What exactly is Zapier and how exactly have we set it up to improve our social outreach?
In this article I’ll glance over a few of the rules we’re using to automatically publish to Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn and show how you can get started doing the same for free.
Quick! What is Zapier?
Zapier provides a way to route data in-between 3rd party platforms and offers a ton of connectable platforms to choose from. Even our Inbound Now tool suite offers a Zapier connection that helps Zapier intercept incoming form submission data and sends that data to nearly where ever we like. It’s a pretty cool and very powerful tool that helps 3rd party services across the globe talk to each other.
Before we begin… what’s the catch/cost?
Straight up, I pay 15.00 a month for the service. I was grandfathered in at this price. But Zapier has a free tier and a paid tier starting at 20.00 a month with discounted annual payment options. For this article’s intent you could easily get started with the free tier. The reason I’m on a paid tier is because I power use my Zapier account for personal and business related reasons and I don’t want my automation systems to fail due to the rate limitations of the free tier.
The Tour!
Inside Zapier: Take a look at all those Zaps!
Below is a screenshot of my Zapier Dashboard where I have all my automation rules setup. Zapier calls these rules “Zaps”. You can see I’ve organized them into folders to keep a better understanding of my workflows.
Twitter Automation through Zapier
Let’s take a look at the Zaps inside the Twitter folder I created for our @inboundnow account. You can see I have two rules, both essentially doing the same thing but one targets new products and the other targets new blog posts. In the next series of screenshots I’ll show how this targeting system is setup.
Next lets take a deeper look into our zap title “RSS to Twitter Photo Post”:
Setting up the Zap: Slideshow
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- Zaps are broken down into two sections, triggers and filters. For our automation to work we’ve selected to use an RSS feed of our latest posts to trigger our actions.
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- Rolling through the steps, we select what RSS action we should listen for. For this step we tell the RSS trigger to listen for a new added item.
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- Further setup asks us to add our RSS feed URL. Here we are only targeting our main blog’s posts.
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- In this step we make sure Zapier can read the data from the RSS feed.
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- After we set up our trigger, we begin to define our action. Here in this step we are getting ready to perform a Twitter post so we select the Twitter app.
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- Twitter offers a few different actions as options. Photo posts perform better than non-photo posts and we can use our featured image as a photo.
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- In this section we connect twitter accounts to our Zapier profile. You can see I’ve used Zapier at one point or another for a handful of Twitter accounts.
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- Coming close to the end of our automation setup we arrive on the step where we create the Twitter tweet template. We have a wide selection of data pulled from the RSS feed that we can use. We can use emojis too!
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- And the final step of this automated task is to test and turn on. After that everytime you publish a new post on your WordPress blog a nice beautiful Twitter tweet will go out shortly after.
The End Result: An example of a generated tweet
Looks good doesn’t it? Zapier auto-published this tweet for us shortly after publishing the below post to WordPress.
FaceBook Page Automation through Zapier
Here are our rules inside the FaceBook folder:
Lets take a deeper look into our zap titled “RSS to FaceBook Page”:
Setting up the Zap: Slideshow
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- Just like with our Twitter zap we will want to choose RSS as a trigger action. I’m going to skip the rest of the RSS setup as I’ve already gone over it in the section above on creating a Twitter Tweet rule.
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- Better to skip to the Action section and show you what the FaceBook setup is like.
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- In this step we will hace the option to create a normal status update or a photo post. For my needs a status update will be what I am wanting to use.
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- Now we’ll have to hook this rule to an added account. Right now I’m off of FaceBook because it’s too crazy for me so I keep all my admin pages connected to my dog’s FaceBook account. Yep, my dog’s name is Jim. He’s a good boy.
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- The next step, after connecting to an account, is selecting which Page we want to post to and setting up our status update template. FaceBook has decent featured image detection so in our case all we really need to use is a permalink and a title to go into the status.
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- And the final step is to test and make sure the automated rule is turned on!
The End Result: An example of an automated FB status update:
Looks good doesn’t it?
LinkedIn Automation through Zapier
Because LinkedIn is a professional networking community I send company status updates to my personal page and Inbound Now’s company page. You can see I’m targeting all blog posts as well as my eCommerce product pages. Once again, all rules are powered by WordPress’s diverse RSS Feeds endpoints.
Lets take a deeper look into our zap titled “RSS to LinkedIn – Company Page”:
Setting up the Zap: Slideshow
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- As with our other rules we begin with an RSS feed powering our trigger action. Please referer to the Twitter Post section for more detail on how this trigger should be setup.
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- Now to the good part… setting up our LinkedIn action.
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- At this setup stage we’ll select to create a company post rather than a personal post.
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- We’ll need to connect to a personal account now that has permissions to post to the company page.
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- Next step is to setup our status update template. Adding the permalink to the status will tell Linkedin to auto-populate the featured image inside the LinkedIn status update.
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- As with the rest of our setups, the final step is to confirm that everything works and make sure our rule(zap) is turned on.
The End Result: A beautiful company status update:
They look good don’t they?
Concluding The Tour
There we have it folks; a quick insight into Inbound Now’s social marketing automation systems powered by Zapier. I sincerely hope this helps someone improve their systems. Of course Zapier is not the only service/tool-suite for social automation, but to date, they are my favorite.
Cheers! Hudson Atwell is a co-founder and the current CEO of Inbound Now. You can follow him on his Twitter at @atwellpub or request him for work on Codeable.io. Thanks for reading!