Automation for Creators, enhancing social media with Zapier.
Produced for University of Calgary Course: Entrepreneurship Technology
In colloboration with: Raj Bonngaling, Jule Hoang, and Darryl Huet
Whether you’re a creator, or someone looking to become one, this tool could help you. People are watching 300 hours of content uploaded every minute on Youtube. With over 30 million active daily users who watch roughly 5 billion videos per day. There is tons of demand for new and exciting content on the internet, and you can get involved. The Youtube platform is the perfect way to build an audience for content you want to create.
Building a sizeable brand requires engaging your audience, and building supporters. Our tools will help you automate social medium platforms, and engage with that audience. This article is directed at the Youtube Creators wanting to improve their workflow. First, let your audience know when you’ve uploaded a new video. Our integration will help build a twitter or discord following, and be part of your brand.
Our Initial Problem
Most Creators start as one-man shows, and very few are fortunate enough to build teams to help with their brand. Many Creators find themselves having to balance between Creating and Brand Management. Using social media to capture, and interact with an audience isn’t a new concept, but we can shed some new light on it. In fact, it’s crucial for content creators to do so, such that their brand can grow. An example is Youtuber Wong Fu Production, they use Twitter to engage their audience of video shoots, as well as new uploads to the platforms. It’s essential for your brand to keep connected, and stay consistent; that’s where our tool comes in.
Youtube’s notification settings have been inefficient at consistently reaching your broader audience. People want to follow their favourite YouTubers, and its unreliability can affect your bottom line. Users want to be able to consume content and keep updated with their favourite creators. There are options to enable notifications, and bell to stay updated with your content. Yet this solution often has had mishaps of disabling. Our fix allows a consistent way for supporters to know when you uploaded a new video, on a platform many already use. Some prominent YouTubers urge followers, and fans to do these tactics. While others rely on solution media managers or taking extra time away from creating. Youtube is has made changes to the platform in the past, such as ads. Building a brand outside of youtube provides stability. Our end product is a consistent time-dated feed that can be easily integrated with other platforms. Our solution has minimal human involvement, including screenshots relevant to the content. We take out many steps for both viewers and content creators by using Twitter or discord for notifications. Having an interactive, and strong connections with a single feed are more accessible than many platforms of social media.
Our Tool
Our tool utilizes Zapier’s ability to automate tasks, and trigger a “Zap” to allow us to automate two applications. The first application is going to be Youtube, which will also act as our trigger. Once triggered, Zapier will automate a process that will post a tweet for you. For other YouTubers, they have communities through the platform Discord. There is an option to integrate Zapier with Discord as an alternative for those Youtubers.
So why Twitter? Our example is only a subset of what’s available on Zapier, and many other substitutes will work. We chose Zapier, Twitter, and Discord as an example due to ease of integration. Content Creators could create many zaps to link all the frontiers of their Brand. Once you’re able to make one tool, it’s easy to make many more with Zapier. Our goal is to give creators a firm understanding of Twitter or Discord integration. Twitter also is one of the few social media platforms that posts chronologically. Other platforms focus on popularity-based posts, like Facebook, and Instagram. The goal is to have your latest posts efficiently reach your audience. With chronological posts, sharing your latest update reaches your wider audience faster. For Discord, since you’re given the ability to host your own server, it makes it super easy to build an audience. Posts are chronological, like Twitter, so we still gain the advantages for-mentioned above.
Why Zapier?
Using Zapier allows the flexibility to automate tools in your workflow quickly. Instead of stressing over the algorithm or many platforms, you can focus on creating. Zapier serves as a “software as a service” automation platform, making it perfect for the job. TechRadar describes Zapier best:
A distribution model for software, whereby instead of downloading the software to run locally on your PC. The program is hosted by a third-party provider, then accessed by users over the internet, typically through a web browser.
Zapier falls perfectly into a flexible model. The server they provide is based around the idea of integrating apps together to merely a task. For Example, they offer explanations of how it works on their Website:
Now for simple tasks, they’re easy to get up in 5 minutes, but there are many ways to increase the complexity of your zaps. The addition to add in different steps and conditions provides lots of versatility. These conditions serve as filters that activate zaps when requirements are met. There is also delay activation, and adding extra actions with different applications.
Do I have to Pay?
Our tool is sufficed for the free version of Zapier. There is a premium edition that offers more complicated functions, and fancy extras. You also get the freedom to have more zaps running concurrently.
Integration
Let’s take a dive into how we will use Zapier to integrate youtube and twitter. We will use Zapier to recognize when a new video is uploaded to your Youtube channel. Afterwards, Zapier will send a customized tweet or discord message to notify users of a new video.
After creating your Zapier account, click on the “make a zap” button. From here we want to trigger an app, in this case, Youtube:
Next, we want to select the option for Zapier to recognize when a new video is uploaded to a specific channel:
From here, link your Youtube account to the app by following the prompts with a pop-up window. Select the account in the following windows (our case, our channel is called the Creation Project).
Now you want to enter your Channel ID. The ID is located in the URL of your youtube Channel, and looks something like this:
Afterwards, we can test the line between our Zapier and our channel. Zapier pulls examples of videos you have uploaded, or provides a default example:
Now that your Youtube channel and Zapier are connected, There are two separate routes for Discord and Twitter.
Twitter Route
First choose the action app that you want to use in response to the trigger of Youtube, in this case, Twitter:
Next, decide what you want Twitter to do; create and send out a tweet containing the thumbnail of the video.
Once more there will be another pop-up window, that links your Twitter account to Zapier. Follow the instructions given by Zapier, then select your Twitter account in the options below.
Afterwards, set up the options for your Tweet. You first have to choose the content of your Tweet. It could be a customized message or a message composed of the title, and-or description of the video. Choose an image, which we will have as the thumbnail of the video but using the drop-down box.
Once you have done all everything, you can test your Zap. Zapier will take one of the videos from your channel (or the default one) and create a test tweet. The final result should have a video uploaded on Youtube, and a Tweet dependent on the content uploaded. If done correctly, should look like this:
Discord Route
The discord route is very similar as we will show. First, choose the action step to be discord:
Next, select what you want Discord’s action to be, here we will have it send a Channel Message
The next step requires you to follow’s Zapier’s instruction to link your discord account:
The Final step is to choose what channel of the server you want the message to be displayed. The message text could be completely customized and could include the title and description. These are the only required fields, but there is also Text-to-speech, Bot Name, and Bot Icon to pick:
Once everything is done, we can test the Zap to see if it worked by checking the action step. The final result should post a message to the discord channel of your choice when a new video uploads.
And it’s as simple as that! Hopefully, this resource for Zapier allows you to reach your audience better. Now you have a simple solution that will always update your social media with your creations. The great thing about knowing how to create this Zap is that it opens the door to more possibilities. This could include more social platforms other business features that could help you. Now lets start building that audience!
