How I Saved Countless Hours with Automated Cross-Posting and AI Assistance

It’s easy to think automation is just more trouble than it’s worth. I used to think that way too. And I was wrong. Cross-posting might seem like a necessary evil, but it doesn’t have to be, especially when you have AI assistance to take things to the next level.

As a marketer or social media manager, you likely manage multiple social networks (who doesn’t nowadays?), and you know how time-consuming cross-posting can be. Whether it’s a new article from your content team or a great piece you found that you want to share with your audience, simply copying and pasting across different platforms can take hours. And that’s not even considering the need to customize each post to fit the specific platform’s format and audience.

But let’s face it, who wants to waste time doing monkey work like that? That’s where automated cross-posting comes in, and it can save you hours, if not hundreds of hours, of valuable time.

So here’s my first step towards saving time for more interesting tasks.

To get started, I create a Google sheet with columns indicating the social networks I want to post to. In each column, I put the text and (if needed) the link for the content I want to share.

In my case it’s Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and a Facebook group.

Next, I configure an automation through Albato to post my content to all of the selected platforms. And then, all I have to do is to click “Start” and voila — my content is posted!

I cam include and exclude my placements here

Now, the process takes less than half an hour. And here’s the best part — it’s customizable. You can transfer texts from Airtable or Notion instead of Google Sheets and even add other social networks.

I’ve already pre-configured those automations on the screen, so you can use them right away. Here’s the link.

Just remember: you should use the same template for your Google Sheet as I used. You can either copy it from my template or create a new sheet with the same columns.

You can copy it from here: Google Sheet Template

Okay, what’s next?

Half an hour might seem okay for one day, but most of that time is spent rewriting the text a bit for each social media platform, finding the right hashtags, and so on.

Sounds like a job for AI, doesn’t it?

That’s why I came up with a prompt that provides a short description of the article and customizes it for each social media platform. Here it is:

Act as a professional marketer with expertise in all areas of marketing, we have an article we want to share on our social networks. For Twitter, we need a short announcement including relevant hashtags. For Discord, we need a catchy and concise headline, encourage discussion in the chat. For Telegram, we need a concise message that entices readers to click through to the article. And for our Facebook Group, we need a friendly and engaging post that sparks discussion. Send the result texts for every social network by new message and start with the name of social network .

Here’s the text of an article: <>

It’s not ideal, and it would probably be better to use the names of social networks as variables. However, this one ChatGPT helped me generate for itself and it’s pretty effective.

(I mean why bother writing a prompt when you can ask ChatGPT to write one for you?)

Okay, now it will generate a network-tailored description for every social media platform. However, I don’t want to go through the tedious process of copying and pasting from ChatGPT to Google Sheets and switching between windows, so I automated this step as well:

Here’s how it works: when I add the text of an article to a cell in my Google Sheets, it sends the prompt to ChatGPT. Then, a few lines of code format the response and send it back to the same cell automatically.

Eventually, I have short, network-specific posts ready to be published.

In fact, they are already posted. Because I have pre-configured automation that cross-posts automatically from the previous steps 😃

In case I want to add more social networks, I’ll only need to add a new column, update the information in my prompt, and add a new variable to my automation.

This automation is also already pre-configured and can be accessed using the same link to use right away.

I think that’s a great way to free yourself from small routine tasks. Additionally, I believe there are other good use cases for these automations, such as:

• Summarizing information from articles for myself when I don’t have time to read the entire piece
• Changing the prompt could also help me analyze my competitors’ articles and find relevant keywords for my own materials. In fact, changing the prompt could help with a lot of other tasks as well. These were just the first ones that came to mind.

I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

P.S. My collegues also did the video based on this article to show how automations should be set up. You can watch it on our YouTube-channel!