Automatically Post Substack Articles to Twitter and Facebook
Zapier to the rescue.
This article may not be interesting to some but I decided to write it nonetheless. Feel free to skip if you aren’t interested in Zapier or automating stuff.
When I first started writing on Substack, I noticed that I could not automatically post my new article to my socials. I hate social media in general and I don’t use my socials. Ever.
Unfortunately for me, if you are not on social media in this day and age, your articles don’t get nearly as much traffic as they could.
But first, a small tangent:
I haven’t always hated social media. Back in 2017-2018 I got into social media advertising. Me and one of my friends started a small social media advertising company which generated leads for real estate agents. Instagram stories were just becoming a thing and Facebook advertising was at its peak. The company was overall successful and it gave me the opportunity to spend thousands of dollars on ad spend. Everything was nicely automated with Zapier. It was a true work of automation art (if I do say so myself).
I loved diving deep into the analytics and optimizing ad spend, ad copy, and ad images. Nothing was more rewarding to me than when I would realize that if I replaced “X” word with “Y” word in my ad copy, I could expect a higher percentage click through rate. It was a fun time.
In 2019, we started to see a change in the quality of leads that we were generating. Facebook had changed something in their back-end which hurt the quality of the leads being generated. Leads also became more expensive. I decided I would have to either adopt to the new changes or I should shutter the business (it was a super small business with only about 10 paying clients).
In 2020, COVID hit. Realtors were out of luck. No one wanted a home; no one wanted to sell a home. I closed the business.
Since 2020, I have not used social media. I don’t really see a point and I don’t have the time. I hate the idea of “being the product.” I don’t want my data sold, I don’t want to be constantly bombarded with ads (ironic because I ran ads once), and at the end of the day IMHO, most social media apps have become stagnant and boring. Tangent over (thank goodness).
I still need to get my articles on social media somehow. I set up an account on Twitter and an account on Facebook. I finally figured out a way to post my new Substack articles automatically with the help of Zapier.
It’s actually very straightforward:
When a new RSS Feed item is detected (https://jmcglock.substack.com/feed), the zap kicks off.
I send a prompt to Chat GPT to generate some hashtags (Print out the best twitter hashtags for the following blog post: <blog post title>).
I create a tweet that contains the title, link, and hashtags.
I create a Facebook post with the same info.
For a while I was having Chat GPT generate a “catchy tweet” that explained the article.
This did not always go as planned and I found myself having to delete some tweets because they did not make sense.
Clearly this tweet is generated by a bot.
All-in-all, this little automation saves me soooo much time.
Cheers,
Joe