In today's post, I wanted to share with you, something that I've been doing for the last few months that helps me automate some of my YouTube workflows.
This is something I've not seen before, I figured it out myself, and I posted about it in a Facebook group where everyone said I should make a video about it - so, I did! You can see it here.
INTRO
This is a way to automate posting your videos onto social media at the right time for when your video goes live.
When I post my video at 1 pm UK Time on Thursdays and Sundays, shortly after there are a series of posts on all my social platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and all sorts to share that video, as well as a few other things.
Now I'm going to break down HOW I do this, right down to what tools you need and how to actually set. this. up.
GETTING STARTED
First up, what we're going to do here is this:
When a video gets posted on YouTube, as in when a video gets published, to the public and 'Goes live', We are going to automagically do this:
- Tweet a specific thing on Twitter
- Post a message onto a Facebook Group
- Post about it on LinkedIn
- Automagically create a blog post for this on a WordPress website
- Send a message in my teams Slack Channel to let the team know a new video has gone live
- Add this to my backlog of social media content in the scheduling app I use.
Phew
So that seems like quite a big task, it takes quite a lot of time to do all of those manually, but with this, you can do ALL of this, instantly. Without you being there. Let's start at the top and into a little of the magic behind how this all works. Oh and also, right at the end I'll let you know how I automated placing an order for captions as well - that'll fit quite nicely into all of this.
HOW IT'S DONE
First off, you need a Zapier account. Zapier is basically an online service that can automate a tonne of tasks for you. If this happens then do this, and this, and this kinda stuff. This will be the fundamental core to what we are doing here.
So sign up for Zapier, and create a new Zap.
In the Trigger box, you want to search for YouTube. Then under Trigger Event, we want 'New Video in Channel'.
Then it will ask to connect your YouTube account - mine is already connected, and then under Trigger, you want to enter channel/ and then your channel ID. To get your YouTube channel ID you just go to the Advanced Settings page in YouTube.
Continue and it will try to find a video that was recently posted.
Now comes the clever part.
In the description of your video, right down at the bottom, you will see something that looks kinda random. It says —SMPOST— and then a short bit of text.
THIS is the key because this is the message we are going to be pushing out on all our social platforms.
Whilst you can post different things to different platforms, let's just keep it simple for now so it's easier to follow through.
In your description, YOU are going to enter —SMPOST— and then whatever you want to type out for a social media post.
Cool - Back to Zapier.
Here, after the video has been uploaded, you want to add a filter, and that filter is going to check if the Description, Contains, —SMPOST—, because we only want to run this process if it contains that text.
Continue, and the next step we want to add is the Formatter.
We want to format Text, choose Split Text with the Transform option and for Input, we're going to pull in the description from our YouTube video.
for Separator, we want to look for SMPOST because that's what we set earlier, and we want to return LAST, which gives us any text posted AFTER that SMPOST tag.
Give it a quick test, and you can see that it's pulled that text away from the description and is now ready to be used on social media.
Now we can simply add in a step for Posting to Twitter, Posting to a Facebook Group, and posting to LinkedIn.
Once you have done those, let's take a look at those other steps. Automatically creating your blog post, posting to slack, teams, or Discord, and archiving the post for reusing again on social media later on.
We continue this with our next step or next action, which is to find the WordPress and we want to Create Post. Now I have recently switched my own websites to Kajabi so I can't show you this part, but essentially you can create that blog post on WordPress and embed the video. A random quick tip for those who are using WordPress, because I get asked all the time - if you're struggling because your website is taking ages to load or you're not ranking well on Google, then click this link to take you to the very best web host that I've come across in all of my time. They focus on WordPress Only and do a bloody good job at doing that. But anyway...
What I do next, and what I still do today, is then for the next action, look for ToDoist, which is my favourite tasks app.
I create a task here, assign it to my VA who takes care of many of the things for me, and they will then go and fill that blog post out with wording, text, and images to make it a fully proper blog post.
With that taken care of, my next action is to send a Channel message into Slack to tell my team that a new video has been posted - and if you had a discord community or something like that, you could use this to notify all of your members that a new video had been published - so that's pretty neat.
Finally, the last step in this process is to connect Zapier to my favourite social media scheduling tool - MeetEdgar, which then takes my tweet which includes the video and stores that in my YouTube posts category, which MeetEdgar will then post and recycle based on what I've set up with Meet Edgar. If you use this link I think you get something like 25% off?
And that is basically it - so a quick summary before we get into that tip on automatically ordering captions.
SUMMARY
In the description for your videos, you want to be using a unique piece of text, something like —SMPOST— and then whatever you want to post online.
Next, sign up for Zapier and you want to trigger when a video is posted. Find that text. Extract the post from after it, and then start hooking Zapier into all of your social platforms, websites, communities, tasks - whatever you need.
Job done.
So how about automatically getting captions added to your videos?
Well my quick tip for this one, is if you haven't already, then sign up for Rev.com. I believe the link gives you $10 to spend so definitely give that a try if you aren't using it already.
Basically with Rev, you can flip a switch, which will automatically order and create captions for your YouTube videos when they get posted.
When I post a video, within 24 hours it will automatically have captions, written by a human, which is way more accurate than any of the AI caption systems, and better than YouTubes built in captions.
They're great for improving your SEO, and it's another one of those checkboxes that you want to tick off when trying to grow a YouTube channel.
Let me know if you found this useful - I might actually make a video about my whole YouTube workflow if there are enough interested people? How I get the video's uploaded to YouTube, tag them, the descriptions, and all that good stuff. Otherwise please head over to the YouTube channel, smash the subscribe button, subscribe if you're not already - and maybe go watch THIS video which is all about how to split test your Thumbnails. Cheers!
