How to use Zapier for social media automation

Social media management isn't just about posting updates across your socials every now and then—you need to have a solid marketing strategy in place to really shine. That requires planning content calendars, personalizing posts for different platforms, and actively engaging with your users. 

But keeping up with multiple platforms, sharing new content, and responding to messages can quickly overwhelm your social media team, especially if they're trying to scale operations. That's where automation (and specifically Zapier) comes in. 

With just a few Zaps—what we call automated workflows—you can repurpose content, stay on top of customer messages, and even streamline your content calendar. Take a look.

Table of contents

• What is social media automation?

• When you should automate social media management

• Social media marketing automation with Zapier

What is social media automation?

Social media automation is the practice of using software to handle repetitive tasks across your social channels—things like scheduling posts, curating content, and responding to common messages. Instead of logging into each platform every day to publish updates or check for mentions, social media automation tools take care of your business-critical processes on a schedule you define. This frees you up to focus on strategy, creativity, and authentic engagement rather than the mechanics of posting.

At its core, social media automation combines three elements: triggers, actions, and rules. A trigger might be a new blog post on your website or a trending hashtag, and the action could be sharing that post across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Rules let you fine-tune the flow—for example, only post images on Instagram or hold back messages from a certain time window—so your automated workflows feel intentional, not robotic.

The benefits of using social media automation software extend beyond time saved. Consistency is easier to maintain, ensuring your audience sees fresh content at optimal times. And because automation handles the routine, you'll have more bandwidth to jump into real-time conversations and build genuine connections with your followers.

When you should automate social media management (and when you shouldn't) 

If you're new to social media automation, the idea of including automation in your work might feel a bit daunting. But it doesn't have to be hard. 

A good strategy is to start by automating repetitive tasks that tend to dominate your to-do list. For example, if you regularly share blog posts on social media, automatically promoting them on all of your social accounts after publication—without your team needing to schedule and publish it manually—would save lots of time. 

You can automate lots of similar social media tasks too, like pulling content from RSS feeds to share, automatically promoting events, and sharing your content with a wider audience. Taking advantage of these time-saving hacks can give your team back time to focus on tasks that require a more human touch—like genuine customer interactions. 

Sometimes, however, automating your social media posts can be a little challenging. Some services don't work well together (maybe the image formatting doesn't quite match up), so manually posting on some sites can lead to better engagement. Before implementing, it's worth testing your automation a few times for unexpected outcomes. Also make sure to read the app terms of service, as well, so you're sure you're following each service's rules about automation.

Automation can also be inappropriate during times of local, national, or global tragedy. While other users are expressing their grief over an event on social, your account could be continuing to promote a product. If you're going to use automation, you should know how, if needed, to quickly turn it all off. In general, just think about what you like (and don't like) on your favorite social networks, and behave in the way that you'd want others to.

Social media marketing automation with Zapier

Zapier is the most connected AI orchestration platform that lets you build and ship automated workflows in minutes. When you use Zapier for managing social media automation, you can connect your social media and social media automation tools to thousands of apps, ensuring your business-critical tools always work together.

Here are some of the most popular ways to automate your social media management with Zapier.

Share new RSS items across your social channels

If you have a thriving content marketing strategy, you know it's not enough to just publish new content to your blog or keep up with industry articles. You also want to share that content with your audience on social. But it's time-consuming to manually repost content across Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks—especially at a high volume.

To lighten the load and streamline your social media management, you can use Zapier to automatically share new RSS items across a wide range of platforms. 

If you don't want to share new content right away, you can also use automation to add new RSS items to the queue in your social media management or content curation tool.

Use AI to write social media posts

No matter how organized your content calendar might be, you still need to write multiple social posts and publish them throughout the day. Doing that at scale can be incredibly difficult, even if you're just repurposing blog posts or insights from call transcripts. 

Instead of manually crafting a post every time, you can use your favorite AI-powered tools (like ChatGPT or Claude) to write them for you, based on the information in your other apps.  

Whether you're pulling content from Airtable, WordPress, or Descript, these Zaps will craft polished posts and automatically share them on your social platforms. That way, you're still posting at scale and maintaining a consistent online presence. 

Repurpose content more effectively

We already looked at how you can use Zapier to automatically share RSS content across channels, but

what if you want to share blog content directly or repurpose other content—like text from an email about your latest promotion? Good news: Zapier can automate that aspect of social media management, too.

You can create a Zap that creates posts on social every time there's new content from a wide range of sources—from new items on your blog to the latest campaign in your email marketing app.

If you don't want to interrupt your carefully crafted posting cadence every time there's new content to share, you can use Zapier to add those posts to the queue in your social media management app.

Sometimes, API restrictions prevent you from posting to a social channel (such as Instagram) using your social media management app. As a workaround, you can use Zapier to automate the process.

Reshare media across platforms

Another challenge social media managers know all too well is resharing media from one social platform to another. If you're heavily investing in high-quality YouTube videos, for example, it makes sense to share it with your audiences on other platforms. But once again, manually resharing can quickly become a huge amount of work.

Thankfully, you can use Zapier for social media automation across platforms, too. You can create a Zap that reshares media—like photos, positive customer reviews, and videos—from one channel to another. 

With Zapier, you can also automate your favorite social management tools, like Buffer. You can add new videos and photos to your queue, publish content, and more.

Stay on top of customer messages

Social media management isn't just about posting proactively—it's also a key way to stay engaged with your audience, field questions, and gauge customer sentiment. But nothing's more challenging than staying on top of an influx of messages, especially if customers reach out asking for something social media managers can't provide, like technical support. 

Thankfully, automation can help. For example, you can create a Zap that automatically sends a response when followers send you new messages on social. If you want to scale even faster, you can use AI tools to draft the content of those messages based on the questions your customers ask.

If you're using a chatbot to interact with your social media audience, you can automate the process of following up to those messages as well. You can use Zapier to both send follow up messages and to update the user's profile as needed, eliminating the tricky handoff between the social media team and customer support or sales. 

Streamline your content calendar

Social media content comes from so many different sources, and keeping your calendar synced up with new content can be a nightmare. Even if you're using a social media management tool like Buffer, you still need to add new content into that app. But that means keeping an eye on your content team's work so you know when it's ready to share publicly. 

For example, you can add a new post to your Buffer queue whenever a Trello card is moved to a specific list—like a "Published" list—or when there's a new row in a Google Sheet. 

If you want to share content at very specific times—or add content to Buffer on a regular cadence, like once a day—you can also use Zapier to automate that repetitive process.

Social media automation is better social media management

So much of social media management comes down to repetitive tasks: Posting regularly, resharing updates across platforms, and fielding similar questions from your customers. By using Zapier to automate that work, you can give your team time back to create truly magical social media moments through valuable content, stunning photos, and meaningful interactions. 

This article was originally published in August 2017, with previous contributions by Hannah Herman and Elena Alston. It was most recently updated in May 2025.