(This tutorial is part of the Podcast Automation Series)Any task that you have to do repeatedly should be automated and writing social posts is definitely included in that! You already have all of your podcast information within your podcast hosting account, so there should be no need to duplicate it.

In this tutorial we show how you can link your podcast host directly to your social media account and send social posts without writing them! 

Now you have a podcast episode published and shared in all of the podcast directories that your subscribers will want to use, you’ll next want to spread the word on social media. However if you’re producing a regular show - it can get repetitive to have to write and post tweets across multiple platforms for each and every episode. 

Transistor Twitter Integration

‍Transistor has a direct integration with Twitter that allows you to quickly sign in and have a pre-written Tweet go out when each episode is published.  You just need to go to the Integrations tab and authorise the Twitter account you would like it to post from first. 

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Transistor API 

However if you have multiple twitter accounts, or a whole range of social media accounts - you’ll need to find a way to automate this. Also you may want to customise the content of the post before it goes out. Transistor has a Zapier integration that allows you to connect to over 2000+ other apps to automate these things, giving you customised social posts, across a wide range of platforms that can be scheduled at your chosen publish time. Let’s go ahead and run through an example to see how this works! First, we’ll need to grab our Transistor API key, that will let us connect Zapier to our Transistor account. You’ll find your API key under your Transistor Account Settings page. Just click your name in the top right corner, go to Your Account, then scroll down to the API Access box. (If an API key it isn’t showing in your account for you yet you may need to reach out to support@transistor.fm to ask them to turn API access on in your account for you). You can expire your API key at this time, however if you expire your key - you’ll need to recreate any integrations and zaps again. ‍

Head to Zapier.com and log in. 

Look up Transistor and Twitter as the apps you’d like to connect together. Then create a zap that says: Whenever an episode is published in Transistor, create a tweet in Twitter. 

Select Use Zap and now we’ll connect our accounts. 

Click to Sign In to your Transistor.fm account and paste in your Transistor API key when prompted and click to continue. 

Select your chosen Podcast from the dropdown list and click Save & Continue.

Click to test the Trigger and it should now be able to pull info from your latest podcast episode. You’ll know the connection between Transistor and Zapier is setup correctly if your episode details are shown. Click Save & Continue

Next we’ll connect to Twitter. Sign in to Twitter and Authorise Zapier. 

Now both Transistor and Twitter are connected, it's time to and write our tweet template. Write out a standard tweet, however for each episode you'll want some of the details to change. So we’ll pull that information from Transistor in the Message drop down list.

So we can say [Attributes Title] of the podcast is now live! That will display as 'Episode 1 of the podcast is now live!'

That will auto update with every episode that you publish. You can also add in the [[Attributes Description]] to pull in some of your episode details into the tweet. We’ll also add in the [[Attributes Media URL]] so that people have a direct link to play the episode. Also we’ll make sure that URL shortening is switched to Yes, to save characters in our tweet, as media URL’s can be long. Your link will be shown as a shortened Zapier link. 

Save & Continue your Tweet. You’ll then get the opportunity to see what the tweet will look like and it will also be sent to your Twitter account too! 

If you check on your Twitter account, you'll see your tweet has gone live!

Keep experimenting with the layout of your tweet until it contains all of the information you want it to have! When you’re happy with how the tweet looks, click Turn on Zap. This will now start running and it will look out for new episodes being published in Transistor and the tweet will be automatically generated. You can repeat this process for each of your other twitter accounts and also for your other social media platforms too!