Airtable automation action: Hootsuite post

To start creating an automation, from the open base of your choice click on Automations in the upper left corner of your screen to open the automation configuration window. Click the + Create automation option to begin the setup process. If you would like, you can rename the automation right away to make it easier to understand what it does.

Next, you will need to click + Add trigger option. Once clicked, the available triggers will display for you to choose from. Click here to learn more about all available automation triggers. Once you have configured and tested the trigger, you can move on to the next step.

1. Click the + Add advanced logic or action option.

2. Scroll down in the menu that appears and find the “Hootsuite” section.

3. While hovering over that option, click the Schedule post option.

1. Feel free to enter a description of what the action will do. You can always add one later if you prefer to skip this step.

2. Under “Configuration,” click the dropdown below the “Hootsuite account” section. From here, either select a previously connected account or connect a new account. More information on managing connected accounts is available here.

3. Once you have connected an account, you’ll need to select the social profiles where the post will be sent.

4. After choosing the social profiles, you can start configuring the “Scheduled time” section. Enter a static date and time or click the cogwheel icon and the Dynamic option to utilize a datetime token from a date field referenced from a field in the underlying Airtable base.

5. Next, you’ll configure the message that will be posted via Hootsuite.

   1. This message can include a mix of static information including text and emojis, as well as dynamic information from records in Airtable using the blue and white plus button to add those tokens.

   2. You can also add one or more attachments to include in your post.

6. Then, optionally add any “Tags” you want the post to contain.

7. After your action configuration looks the way you want it to, click Test action to ensure the message is looking the way you want it to. Feel free to adjust the configuration before moving on to the final step below

Again, be sure to test all of the steps in the automation that you are building. Once every part of the automation has tested successfully, you’ll likely be ready to turn the automation on. Find the red colored “OFF” toggle and click it so the automation now appears as “ON” in green.

For this example, we’ll be using a simple table we created to keep track of all the upcoming articles for our blog. Our ideal workflow is: once a featured article’s status is set to Approved a new Hootsuite post is automatically scheduled, with all the correct content, at that article’s Post Time.

Choose a trigger

After creating your new automation, the first thing you’ll need to do is carefully choose the trigger. This trigger will tell the automation when to run, and which record’s information you’ll be using to schedule a post with Hootsuite.

For our example workflow, we’d like to schedule a post whenever a featured article’s status has been set to Approved. We’ll use the When a record matches conditions trigger to ensure that our new automation is triggered only when a blog post has the Approved status and it is one of our featured articles.

Add an action

Once our trigger is configured, and tested, we can move on to setting up our action. Select the “Hootsuite: Schedule Post” action and you’ll then be prompted to select or connect, your Hootsuite account.

Once your account is connected the “Social Profiles” dropdown will populate with all the Social Profiles that you currently have set up in Hootsuite. You can choose to use one, or multiple, social profiles to schedule a post for.

Now you can specify the following inputs for your future post(s):

1. Scheduled Time - the date and time your post(s) will be scheduled to be posted

2. Message - the content you’d like your post to include, and the format for that content

3. Attachments - any images or other files you’d like to attach to your post

4. Tags - you can specify comma-separated tags for your post

We’ll start with the “Scheduled Time” input. In our example table we had a date field named Post Time that specified both the date and time that our article will need to be posted.

We can then format the content for our future post using the “Message” input. Finally, we want to make sure we include any attachments that are associated with our article by filling in the “Attachments” input. Below is the configuration for our article example.

Test and enable your automation

At this point, you’ll want to make sure to test your action and ensure everything is configured properly. You’ll now be able to turn on the automation and see your new posts in Hootsuite. If you have any final tweaks to make to a post once the Automation has run- you can always change those posts in Hootsuite before it goes live.

If you’d like to have the flexibility to format posts for different social media platforms, we recommend creating separate automations for each of those platforms.

We’ll use our example from above to showcase a possible workflow for handling different social platforms. We’ve added a multiple select field to our table to track the different social platforms where we’ll be posting our articles.

We can now create multiple automations to account for each social media platform. Here is an example where we adjusted our trigger to handle articles posting to Twitter.

With that trigger in place, we can choose to only use our Twitter “Social profile” from Hootsuite.

We can now freely format the message for this action knowing that this post will just be for Twitter.

Your automation will display an error for attempts to schedule posts in the past.

If the Hootsuite account for a related automation is deactivated or disconnected, then the automation will cease to work until a new Hootsuite account is connected and configured.

We support the following social profiles:

• Twitter

• Facebook (Pages and groups)

• LinkedIn

• Instagram Personal (Instagram Business accounts are not currently supported by Hootsuite's API)

You are unable to select Facebook personal profiles in the Hootsuite action because the Facebook API won’t allow posting to them.