Social media automation can save you dozens of hours every month. Here's the exact, step-by-step process that we use to automate social media posting.
Today, you’re going to learn exactly how to implement social media automation tools for your content idea. Specifically, how to automatically push new content to be published in all of your social media accounts.
You will be able to set this social media marketing process up and forget about it—the automation tools will streamline everything.
In this blog post, We will go through the exact step-by-step digital marketing process to implement real-time social media automation on your WordPress website, so that you can easily and automatically curate content for your social media posts.
Let’s get going.
First, let’s do a high-level overview of what this is:
- Goal: To have an automated process as part of your social media strategy to share your newly published WordPress blog posts on different platforms.
- Ideal outcome: You’ll be able to attract your target audience to your new content from social media marketing campaigns while saving a lot of time on social media publishing.
- Pre-requisites / requirements: We usually recommend that you have the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
- You also need to have at least one relevant content on your website, ready to go.
- Why is this important: Social media publishing is a time-consuming task and one that marketers and publishers tend to skip in their marketing strategy. Automating this you’ll save a lot of time, increase your social media presence, and generate traffic from your social media content.
- Where this is done: This’ll be done on WordPress, Zapier (and maybe Buffer), along with all of your social media accounts.
- When this is done: You only need to do this once for each of your social media channels.
- Who does it: You, or your social media manager, content manager, content curation team member, or anyone responsible for your social media management.
Let’s get started.
Get This Entire Walkthrough and All the Resources in This Post
Automation/Publishing Tools: Zapier vs. Buffer
In this walkthrough, we will be using Zapier to automate publishing directly to your social media accounts.
This automating tool is more suitable for people who want to have everything published automatically to every social network, immediately after they publish it on their blog.
An optional helpful tool would be Buffer.
The Buffer option is a little bit more advanced. In this case, you would write your post and once it’s done, it gets added to a queue in Buffer. This allows you to schedule posts and publish them on your social media profiles on your posting schedule.
For this blog post, we’ll go with Zapier for social media marketing automation (but you can get the Buffer walkthrough through the form above.)
Social Media Automation Using Zapier
If you don’t have a Zapier account, make sure you sign up for one here. Then, follow these steps:
- Log into your Zapier account and click “Make a Zap,” to get started.
- Name your Zap. I called mine “Automatically share posts to social media”. The first step will be to set up the trigger for scheduling content automation: Whenever a new blog post is published on WordPress.
- Choose the trigger app—in this case, it’ll be WordPress (search it using the search bar there).
- Choose the curating trigger. In this example, the trigger will be “New Post”.
- Connect your WordPress account and then click “Save and Continue”.
- Edit your setup options: Your post status should be “Published”, and your post type should be “Posts”.
- Click “Fetch and Continue” to test your trigger. To do this, you need to make sure you have at least one post published on your WordPress site.
You will see that Zapier has pulled some data from your WordPress blog already.
Now, that you have the data from your WordPress blog post, you’ll use that to create and publish a post in a social media account—for this walkthrough, we’ll use Twitter as an example.
- Select Twitter as the action app and click “Save and Continue”.
- Choose your action type. In this example, it was “create a Tweet”.
- Connect your Twitter account to Zapier.
Now, we’ll create a template for the posts that will be shared on social media.
- In the “Message” field, we’ll place the template of the message that we want to tweet and populate it with the keywords, brand mentions, and data from the WordPress blog. (You can also add hashtags related to your company.) In my case, I chose to use the template “Check out my new post [POST TITLE] at [LINK]”—but I’m sure you can come up with something better than that 😉
- Select the placeholder for the title of the post and then click on the icon on the right of the field to see all the possible variables. Then, choose “Post Title” from the list.
- And then do the same for the “[LINK]” placeholder.
- Click continue to go to the test step, and check that the message looks and reads fine.
- If you want, you can click “Send Test to Twitter” to publish the post immediately and go to your social account to verify that the post was published correctly.
- If everything looks OK, just “Turn on your Zap” and you should be good to go!
You can repeat the same process for Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social media platform you’re using. All you have to do is add the designated social media account like Facebook pages, Twitter handles, etc. to your Zapier account and go from there, the same as I did in this example.
That’s all there is to adding social media automation to your WordPress site for scheduling posts to your social media campaigns. Doing this will help you bring more attention to your awesome blog posts, and, consequently, gain more traffic on your blog from social media, without having to worry about manually posting each blog to each of your social media accounts every time you write a new one.
