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I’m curious to know if it’s possible to have Airtable automatically post content to social media platforms using “New row in view” and integrations with IFTTT or Zapier.


What I’ve attempted to do is setup a base that has a content table with includes Date (and Time) field, and then a formula field — let’s call it “Post” — to calculate the number of minutes until/since the given date/time in the Date field.


Then I created a view that fillters out all records where Post is “< 1” and “> -60” minutes, creating a view that only shows records where the “time until post” is less than one monite and no more than 60 minutes ago.


I was hoping that as these records came into view they would trigger the Airtable action in IFTTT which I could then use to automatically post social media content. I was able to use this trigger to send a notification to my phone through IFTTT, but that only worked when I selected that view in Airtable during the 60-minute window. I tried another notification without Airtable open and it didn’t work.


This leads me to believe there Airtable triggers only work when Airtable is open in a browser window.


Questions:



  1. Is it the case that these triggers only work while Airtable is open in a browser/app?

  2. Does anyone know of a successful way to accomplish this, other than having a tab open in Chrome and having it reload at a set interval?


Thanks!



  1. Judging by the name “New row in view,” and my understanding of how views operate, that trigger will only work with Airtable open. Views aren’t perpetually updating in the background when Airtable isn’t open. They only useful when someone is viewing them.




  2. Another way to achieve this, rather than expecting the trigger to come from Airtable, is to have Zapier check the table at predefined intervals, find all records that are close to the current time (within a predetermined tolerance), and make the relevant post(s). If Zapier can’t pull that off, consider Integromat. I doubt that IFTTT will offer that kind of control, but I’m pretty sure Integromat could do it.



If i can clarify a bit, it actually doesn’t matter if you have a browser open, it actually does happen in the background in Zapier. We manage hundreds of Zaps running like this.


When Zapier queries your table, it will detect what records are currently visible in the view provided. I haven’t worked with IFTTT so maybe its different (although I don’t know why it would be).


If it doesn’t work in Zapier, then I’d guess something is wrong with your view filter or something else going on.

Thanks! I actually figured it out from another thread.

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