With the #posh platform growing, and the recent addition of @poshbot, and the upcoming introduction of #poshtoken, it is great to see that always more Hivers take to the more traditional social media platforms and make an effort to actively promote the content on the platform. Promote beyond the lazy early days Facebook Groups which were rarely more than a “dump your link” Discord channel but then in a Facebook group. And rarely resulted in any traffic to the shared content.
Nowadays things have massively changed, especially on Twitter. In recent months an active Twitter community has grown and it is not unusual to see Twitter posts by Hivers receive tens of likes, sometimes even more than 100, as well as multiple retweets and replies.
But managing social platforms is a burden and I think the time spent sharing your links on every platform can be better used actually interacting on the platforms.
So let’s automate our posting to social media platforms. And let’s make automation easy. Accessible to anyone. Last but not least... let’s automate for free!
Note: Often it is better to compose your tweet or FB share manually, rather than automate them. Especially because so far no Hive frontend offers the option to write specific titles for social media platform. Social media pros will often even write different content for FB, Twitter, and Reddit. Because what works on FB may not necessarily appeal to the Reddit community.
Step 1: Prepare Your Hive Feed for Automated Sharing
Currently no platform on Hive offers RSS feeds. RSS feeds are a semantic technology which can be interpreted by other tools, like news readers, aggregators, and many other possibilities.
We are going to use HiveRSS by @torrey.blog to prepare our content for automated posting.
HiveRSS is very easy to use. It can be used both for your own content or for content from a community or a tag.
To get the URL of your RSS feed for your feed, replace your username in the following URL:
http://hiverss.com/@yourusername
This will use hive.blog links for all your posts. If you prefer visitors to be sent to Peakd instead, use the following method. Again, don’t forget to replace your username!
http://hiverss.com/@yourusername?interface=peakd
If you regularly use feed readers, like Feedly or the excellent Reeder app on iOS or MacOS, you can now easily add the RSS feeds of your preferred Hive creators and see their updates in your RSS app of preference.
But that’s not why we want the RSS feed of our content, right. We want to automate our social shares each time we post.
Step 2: Automate Sharing Your Posts to Twitter and Facebook
Next we need an app which automates the posting to Twitter and Facebook. There’s two excellent apps available to do this and both are free(1): IFTTT and Zapier.
For this guide we will focus on IFTTT or IF This Then That.
Once you signed up to IFTTT, all you need to do is click the Explore button at the bottom of the page. Next in the search bar, search for RSS Twitter. You will see several options now but all do the same.
So we are just going to select the most popular applet, as IFTTT calls those “mini apps”, by robertmills.
In the next screen, slide the Connect slider to the right. Next you will have to login to your Twitter account to authorize IFTTT to post to your Twitter.
In the following screen change the RSS feed address to https://hiverss.com/@yourusername and save your applet.
That’s all there is to do. Next time you post on Hive, IFTTT will automatically tweet your post. Thanks to wonders of automation, @poshbot will let you know on Hive when your post was tweeted(2).
The same method applies when you want to share your Hive posts to a Facebook page. IFTTT can also do that for you.
If you looked through all the RSS to Twitter applets you may even have found one which posts to both Twitter and a Facebook page, but I don’t use Crackbook so could not verify whether that applet functions properly.
Note that Facebook tends to lower visibility for automated posts compared to manually posted page updates. As if regular visibility for updates wasn’t bad enough yet. All to make you promote your updates and make Zuck & Co. richer.
If you’re a photographer or artist you may even want to automatically post your updates to Pinterest. IFTTT can do that too.
You can even post directly to your preferred subreddit. Which will make @acidyo happy, of course.
IF This Then That (IFTTT) brings automation to the every day user and now also to every Hiver.
Zapier
Zapier is a similar service and operates along the same lines. Personally, I think that IFTTT is the simpler option. But, of course, we also use Zapier but that mostly because it has many more options. Zapier is used by many devs and apps to connect and automate between different service. While we love IFTTT for its simplicity and ease of use, we love Zapier for its versatility.
Zapier tends to have many more available options for most platforms and RSS and Twitter are no exception to this.
Setting Zapier up is no different from IFTTT. Select the “zap” integration you want, connect your Twitter account, enter your RSS address (the HiveRSS link) and save.
Sit back.
With Zapier it’s also easy to automatically share your posts in a Facebook Group. Even if the “zap” doesn’t exist as a default RSS & Facebook Groups template. Just combine both triggers yourself, as show in the screenshot.
What About Instagram?
I know there’s several of you here who want to automate their posting to Instagram, but Instagram doesn’t provide an API which allows automated posting. Instagram wants you to do the work manually. But don’t sweat it, the return from Instagram to your post is very poor because you can not post links to your Instagram update. And constantly reminding users “link in profile” is not a smooth experience and has a very poor conversion rate.
Forget about dopamine machine Instagram already. We’re on the blockchain, we’re disrupting the old, gated social media world!
Bonus Tip
If you’re an active tweeter and spend a lot of time interacting on Twitter, you may want to spread out your tweets a little. This also applies if you share a lot of links to Twitter. Give your followers time to read the links you share. Time for a breather and a cup of coffee even.
This is also easy to do with and can be integrated with your automated posting. For that I recommend the excellent Buffer app. Buffer allows you to easily schedule tweets and will then tweet them for you, even when you’re away from your device. Buffer works with your share sheet on mobile devices or with a browser extension in your preferred browser.
You can even connect your RSS feed to your Buffer with both IFTTT and Zapier.
If you use Hootsuite for your social media scheduling, Zapier can help you.
(1) Both operate on a freemium model
(2) IFTTT normally checks every 60 minutes so there may be a little delay between your post and the automated tweet
Hey, thanks for the mention. Great tutorial.
As far as I know, IFTTT uses their own URL shortener, so the link shares won’t count for poshtoken. I could be wrong.
That's one for @acidyo's bucket list then. Or his dev's bucket list. :D
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Great article and how to. Nice work, thanks
Thanks :)
Keep in mind IFTTT is about to get nerfed with the addition of pro accounts. Unless you pay, you are limited to 3 custom actions.
It’s “pay what you want” for Pro, at least for now. I think the minimum is $1.99.
Pro accounts have been introduced already. You now only have 3 custom applets allowance anymore. But I didn't see any limitation on using existing applets. Just tells me I've used (5 out of 3) custom applets in my account.
With Zapier in the freemium model you have only 5 zaps available.
That’s a badass idea thanks for sharing that
Thanks a lot for this tutorial :)
Is there a way to automatically add the hash tags used in the blog post to be shared on Twitter? At the moment it gets shared, but without hash tags..