loop social media for free

How to Automate and Loop Social Media Posts for Free

BySuzi Whitford

Automate and Loop Social Media Posts for Free

Want to make your life easier? Want to post on social media and use all those fancy tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and MeetEdgar, but have a small budget? Here is a free alternative that works amazingly well! And if you haven’t started your blog yet, hop on it! You can loop your posts onto your social media accounts and have them repeat daily, weekly, monthly – as you wish! All for free. The video below is a step by step guide. I go through all the steps to show you how it works. I even test it at the end to earn your trust! 🙂 

What you need:

  1. Account with IFTTT
  2. Google Calendar

Setup for Twitter in IFTTT:

ifttt twitter

Setup for Facebook in IFTTT:

ifttt facebook

Bonus Tip:

Set up multiple recipes in IFTTT and have different hashtags for each one. Then use the same Google Calendar event and place all of those hashtags in your Title. The post below will show up on both Twitter and Facebook for me – automatically – every week on Monday! 🙂   

double dipping

Need more detailed steps and can’t watch the video? Then read the steps here in my guest post on Social Media Examiner. 

Liked it? No,… you loooooved it!

If this helped you and if you consider yourself to be a helpful person, would you mind sharing this video with your friends, I would really appreciate it? <3

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  • Hey Suzi do you have an update for this strategy? Possibly adding an a change to Ifttt or how to do it on Zapier. I love this strategy, but I tried implementing it and it is not working. I have no clue how to do it on Zapier

    Reply

  • Hello Suzi, is it possible that this is not working properly in 2019? I just set up my Applets on Twitter and Facebook. Posts are only published on Facebook if I manually click “Check now”. On Twitter, minutes pass and nothing is published. Should posts be published immediately? I’ve been waiting for 10 minutes but nothing is published on Twiiter, and neither on Facebook automatically. Any ideas? Thank you very much

    Reply

  • I have a question. I want to put in more than one hashtag so it can post to multiple social media outlets. However, is this possible? And if so, what size should the image be so it looks good?

    Reply

  • Hi Suzi,
    This is an awesome find, really super useful. I am having a bit of a problem though. I have set the IFTTT connection as instructed and the event in the calendar. The tweet goes out however the image is not being displayed in the tweet, instead, it shows a message box with IFTTT in the top left-hand corner and ‘Image Not Found’. Any ideas why this may be?

    Reply

  • Suzi! Thank you so much for this video. I had no idea this could be done. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I am super excited this could be done. Thank you!

    Reply

  • Hello
    I got this to work with twitter but with facebook it doesn’t post the image, just an image saying accounts.google.com google calendar, and some info about google calendar and a greyed out head. I’ve tried using the article link and a direct link to my image but still no image. I am using the facebook pages option in IFTTT to link to my page. I saw a comment above saying they had to use #facebook pages in the settings but mine was working just with #facebook, except for having no image. Any ideas how to get the image to display? I’ve been working on this all day and ready to give up

    Reply

  • Hi Suzi, thank you for putting it together. This is amazing technique! The only question I have is about Facebook. Won’t Facebook punish you if you post the same content repetitively – like the same post on Monday morning? Thank you!

    Reply

  • Looks like I may be the only Dude in the comments, but I take that as a mark of distinction!

    I appreciate your deep dive into this method, Suzi. I think it’s something I could use. But I have a couple of questions…

    #1 – How far apart are you setting the repeat on these? It seems that weekly would be far too often for a particular blog post (for example).

    #2 – Have you found an easy way to update the schedule so it’s not the same old content going out week after week? Is it as simple as updating on event on Google calendar and then applying it to the entire repeating sequence?

    Reply

  • Wow! This process is genuinely exciting! There are so many potential costs when starting out as a blogger that it’s fabulous to see the step-by-steps to handling social media posting – for free! Thanks so much for sharing, Suzi 🙂

    Reply

  • Loved the video Suzi!! Easy, effective and it worked great for me!! To think I was about to spend so much money on Buffer, and other schedulers. Thanks for saving a newbie business woman a TON of mullah! :))

    Reply

  • Hi, Suzi! Thanks so much for the video! I’m curious, though… when you repeat all events do you not think it might get annoying to your audience on Twitter to see the same posts from you over and over again?

    I’m definitely going to have to give this a shot for sure.

    Reply

      • HA! Yes, the problem was I selected Facebookpages as my channel so it would post to my farm page not personal. Therefore when I created the event in the google calendar I had to write #facebook pages ! not just #facebook. This is the most wonderful thing I have learned lately. thank you so much for taking the time to share it.

        Reply

      • HA! Yes, the problem was I selected Facebook pages as my channel so it would post to my farm page not personal. Therefore when I created the event in the google calendar I had to write #facebook pages ! not just #facebook. This is the most wonderful thing I have learned lately. thank you so much for taking the time to share it.

        Reply

  • Suzi, I want to give you a huge hug!! I’ve put off doing Twitter because I hated using Hootsuite where I had to redo all my tweets every single week and it was just too much. I followed your directions exactly and used your template and I just want to shout! Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

  • Suzi!! I am seriously so excited right now. I heard about this a few months ago, but it seemed too technical so I have just been using Buffer. Your video tutorial helped so much. I need to get this set up ASAP! Thanks for saving me a million years of posting on social media. Xo.

    Reply

  • So, I didn’t read all the comments, but I do have one question. How do you update this system? For example, you have a new blog post, do you just manually add it to google calendar? do you add it to the csv file and then update it later? What is your system for a new post?

    Reply

  • Thanks for putting together this video! Repeat all events is genius! Is there a way I can use this with images that don’t “live” on my site. I have a bunch of quote images that I would like to publish but they are on my hard drive. I just want to publish the images and not have them link to anywhere. Thanks again!

    Reply

    • Hi Kalisha! Thank you for the comment. You will have to upload the images somewhere – or at least get an image url. IFTTT needs to know where to find them, even if they don’t link out to anything else. What you could do is upload them to your wordpress site, then go into their settings and copy the image url. Paste that in the ‘where’ input box. This will show the image but it won’t link to anywhere else. Let me know how it goes!

      Reply

  • You are my hero today!! So glad I saved your video to watch this morning! I was intimidated by IFTTT, but unwilling to pay for tailwind and all the other for-pay products. Your explanation was plain and clear and I’m so excited about using IFTTT not only for the blog but for my husband’s business posts. I’ve always been a huge fan of Google, so I’m not sure why I never used the calendar functions (except when Facebook automatically imported events for me), but you have inspired me to go digital on this. THANK YOU!

    Reply

  • This was amazing! Thank you so much for sharing this! I’ve added this to my Wunderlist to work on adding my evergreen posts and my new posts that I share. So I can set up a recipe like that for all of my social media accounts just need to use the hashtag to tell it which one to share to, correct? So freaking awesome!

    Reply

    • YES! You can even have the SAME post (calendar event) trigger multiple social media accounts. For example, if you use the hashtags #facebook and #twitter in your Google Calendar event title – that one post will be posted on Facebook and on Twitter. Sweet, eh?! (You just have to be sure to use the same hashtags you set up in your IFTTT recipes in your event titles)

      Reply

  • Hey Suzi,

    Great video. I’ve never used IFTTT so have no clue what it is. My question is in IFTTT you set the template right? Then in G Calendar you can modify or change the postings?

    So you uploaded your CSV file and then repeat those tweets. So you are repeating the same tweet for months? How do you change them for a new set of tweets? In G Calendar? or would you just add more in your CSV file and the re-upload to G Calendar?

    Sorry for the confusion. I’m still trying to figure this all out 🙂

    Reply

    • Hi Elna,

      Thanks for the comment! I’ll do my best to answer all your questions here:

      1. Yes, you set the template in IFTTT. But it’s more a recipe – you are telling IFTTT that whenever an event appears on your Google Calendar with the specific hashtag you decided, (#twitter), IFTTT will push that event to Twitter, or any other social media account you decided.

      2. In Google Calendar you can input whatever link or post you want to and image too. IFTTT are the steps, and Google Calendar is the ingredients 😉

      3. Yup, at this time I am repeating the same tweets indefinitely, forever. But I can go in at anytime and modify a Google Calendar event. I can delete a tweet, modify the content/text, or remove/include @mentions.

      4. When I publish a new post, I would create a new Google Calendar right on the Calendar view and be sure to include my trigger hashtag in the title, in my case, #twitter.

      5. I would not reupload the entire file, that would duplicate events. I only use the file to upload my initial mass amount of posts. After that if it’s just a few posts I want to add, I’ll do it manually in Google Calendar one by one by clicking directly on the calendar and adding an event.

      You have complete control on how often you want the tweets to repeat etc. Once you setup the recipe in IFTTT – you do not need to go into IFTTT again. You can control everything from then on in Google Calendar 😉

      I hope that helped!

      Reply

  • I loooooved it!!!
    Thank you so so much for posting this. I knew it was possible to do this, because I heard it in a Webinar but you just made it so much easier. I would’ve spent hours working out how to do it and then inputting everything into Google Calendar… I’m so excited to get this working! I think its actually easier than using Hootsuite.
    🙂

    Reply

    • Cath,

      Thank you so much for the comment!

      I would have spent hours too putting every event into my Google Calendar one by one… but with the spreadsheet and the import ability it makes it so much easier!

      The only time consuming part is going into each event and making it repeat. But it’s a one time thing and then you have your posts on a loop!

      So cool and I’m still surprised it’s free! I’m all about saving money!!

      xoxo

      Reply

  • This looks great, but I’m not very tech savvy. I have a few questions. Can you use this for other social media besides twitter? Also, how to you create a CSV file? Thank you!!!!

    Reply

    • Rebecca, thanks for the comment! Yup, you can hook up Facebook, a Facebook Page, … and I just checked, and I think this is new, but you can connect it to Pinterest! Oh I may have to give that one a try, even though I use Tailwind 🙂

      You can download the CSV file I have in this post for you and then edit it in Excel or on a Google Sheet 🙂 Let me know if you have more questions! xoxo

      Reply

    • OH MY GOSH SUZI THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!!!!

      I have been trying to figure out a way to loop my social media marketing without forking out an arm and a leg and you have just provided us all with the holy grail, thank you!

      And just in case anyone is wondering, you can use hashtags in the descriptions too!

      Elise xo

      Reply