How We Built a Social Media Publishing Tool Using Airtable + Make (formerly Integromat)

For my own as well as for business purposes, earlier I used to rely on tools like Hootsuite, Buffer & others.

Though never really got hang of them due to following reasons:

• Constraints in free subscription: Limited social accounts, no/limited analytics

• Felt it doesn't warrant a monthly subscription. Think it only works for large agencies who want to manage workflows etc

  
  

In fact, once we got a paid intern just to post manually on all the channels.

And then I got exposed to some lovely no-code tools like Make(formerly Integromat) & Airtable. And that's how the experiment started to see if I can develop something that can work for our use cases.

And voila, it worked out. We now post on UXHack channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Telegram) through our own Social Media Management Tool.

It's a direct time saver for us being an early-stage startup.

And thus thought to write a basic construct on how we were able to accomplish it using the above-mentioned No-code tools.

Airtable:

Airtable.com is a powerful, visual platform that helps you build databases and tables on the fly. Also, they provide an easy form view to get entries to the table

We created a table and a form through which we submit the Social posts

Make (formerly Integromat):

Make is a powerful workflow automation tool (similar to Zapier) that has integrations to popular apps like Social Media Platforms, Airtable, Gmail, Slack, and many more

It also provides an automatic job scheduler through which you can actively poll the source App for a new event.

And that’s how Make is able to listen to our Airtable workspace and fetches all posts that are not yet published

Once the post is fetched on the Make side is where all the logical checks are done:

• Does the post contain hyperlinks

• Does the post has a media attachment (for now we only check for Image files)

• Does the post is meant for specific channels or all supported channels

  
  

Based on the rules, the post moves through the Integromat workflow rules and gets published

Once the post is published, the status is automatically updated on the Airtable side.

Tracking the performance of our Social media posts

So in general all posts we publish, they have one or the other hyperlinks to our website uxhack.co

And hence while parsing hyperlinks via Make, we append UTM parameters to those in a way like:

• For Twitter: twitter_integromat is added as utm_source and utm_medium (perhaps updated utm_source should now be twitter_make 😀)

And likewise for other channels

We believe impressions are vanity metrics. For us what matters is how much traffic to our site we could attribute to these posts.

And thus basis UTM parameters, we have created a custom dashboard on Google Analytics that gives us a good view of:

• Traffic comparison basis social channels
• Comparison of different posts (basically hyperlinks)

Obviously, this is not as intuitive as Hootsuite or Buffer interface but definitely, worth the effort, we have put in.

Have certainly given me the confidence in building more such productivity tools :)

P.S: If you are in the same boat, I have published the same on Gumroad: https://nishvt.gumroad.com/l/smmtool . You can access and export Airtable and Make templates for free, or if you would like to support the tool further, do a one-time purchase, either by paying what you feel is a fair price or opting for a premium version.