Tool: Airtable & Twitter (free plan)
Thanks to the automations and the way data can be structured in Airtable, it’s a great tool for building a content system.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create an automatic system that posts your tweets when you change the status of a record in your table.
Let’s dive into it.
Building the base
First I created a new base in Airtable called „Content System – Twitter“ which consists of a single view.
The table contains the following columns:
- Topic (Field type: Long text) – I use this to brainstorm my content ideas.
- Categories (Field type: Multiple select) – To categorize my content.
- Hook, Body and Summary (Field type: Long text) – To systematize my content. My content starts with a hook to grab attention, followed by the main body of my Tweet and finally a short summary. This eventually leads to the following Tweet formats:
- Image (Field type: Attachment) – if there is an image and it’s in this column, it will be posted automatically.
- Post date (Field type: Date)- the date and time at which I plan to publish.
- Posted (Field type: Single select)- a status field that shows whether the Tweet has been published or not.
- Two formula fields that show how long the post is in relation to the character limit on Twitter.
One formula counts the characters and the other signals via emoji whether I’m keeping the character limit or not (✅ = I haven’t reached the limit yet, 🚨 = I’m over 280 characters).
Growth tip 💡
Why is my content divided into hook, body and summary?
Hook: The show stopper – the goal of the hook is to grab the attention of Twitter readers. This is how I get into the conversation in the minds of my target audience. The goal is to get them to read the next sentence.
Body: The content – this is where my actual content is placed. For example, a hack or tips or something similar.
Summary: To get to the point – with the summary, I give my readers my point of view and the conclusion. This is what I want them to take away from my post.
To set up the formula fields, I used the following formulas:
SUM(LEN(Hook),LEN(Body),LEN(Summary)) – counts the characters of my „Hook“, „Body“ and „Summary“- fields and returns the total number of characters.
IF(SUM(LEN(Hook),LEN(Body),LEN(Summary))>280,“🚨“,“✅“ – also counts the characters in these fields, but shows me different emojis depending on the number of characters.
That’s it for the core of my Twitter content system.
Building the automation
First, I created an automation that posts when my status is „Posted“ in the Posted field.
The automation looks like this:
To create it, we select the trigger „When a record matches the conditions“:
Now we add our table.
In my case it is the table „Content“:
The next step is to set the condition that will eventually be the trigger for our tweet.
In my case it is the condition „When Posted is „Posted““.
After we set up the trigger, we define our action.
This is where the Twitter integration comes into play.
To do this, we add the „Post tweet“ action:
Now we connect and select our Twitter account.
A window will open where you have to confirm that Airtable is allowed to post with your Twitter account:
Time to create the Tweet.
To do this, we click on the blue plus and select our text modules:
In my case it’s „Hook“, „Body“ and „Summary“.
The good thing is that Airtable takes care of spaces and paragraphs.
So you can format your Tweets properly:
Finally, we can add our image field to the attachments to make sure that every time an image is included in our table, it is posted along with the Tweet:
Now you can test your automation.
If everything is set correctly, every time the status field in your table changes, you will publish your Tweets.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, suggestions for improvement or need help in any way, contact me on Twitter or send me an email here. I would love to hear from you!
