As all marketing experts will tell you posting regularly on social media sites is one of the keys to building an audience. But how do you post regularly while writing new content, replying to readers and managing your business?
There are a number of tools here that can help and if you follow me on social media you will see I don’t just post new content but also recently published content. Nothing in marketing 101 says you have to keep posting new content every day as long as the content is relevant and recent.
In my case, all my content is very green and not time relevant so I have set up automation with Integromat and Buffer to keep a constant feed of recent posts on my site going out over my social channels.
What you need
To do this you will need:
- A Buffer account
- An Integromat account
- An RSS feed
Buffer Setup
The first part here is to get your Buffer account set up with your social channels linked and ready for posting. You should also set up a posting schedule as we are going to use Integromat to fill the posting schedule with a random post from your RSS feed.
Integromat
This is where the real work is done. We are going to create a new task that will run at intervals. We want this to run an equal number of times per day to what you are posting on social media via Buffer. This is to ensure your Buffer feed never runs off content to post.
Now the trigger is sorted we need to add an RSS feed to retrieve. This will be a URL provided by your content management system. Set the date from on the retrieve options on date from to {{addDays(now; -30)}} and the date to field to now this will only pull posts published in the last 30 days.
With the date range of posts limited to the last 30 days now, we need to decide which post from this range we want to send to Buffer. To do this we generate a variable using the value of {{floor(random * 12) + 1}} . This will generate a random number between 1 and 12. It is important to note if your RSS feed doesn’t output 12 posts you should change this number to the maximum number of posts your feed outputs.
Once we have the random number we need to iterate over the feed with a filter to find the post that sits at the point of the number we generated. For the filter that comes after the iterator, we want to use the bundle order position and the random number that we generator. When this condition is true we send the title and URL to Buffer as the next item in the queue.
