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Social Media Post Queue Automation

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rfriedman
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I am using Airtable to create an advanced social media calendar. It is used to manage 150 social media accounts - each account corresponds to a specific university.

A student submits a form with pictures and a caption that they would like to have posted on their schools account. When the form is submitted, a record is created in Airtable. All records for all schools go into the same Table and are tagged with the school on which the content should be posted via a linked record. There is a second table that has the list of all of the schools.

I would like to create a function or automation that assigns each record with a date and time to be posted. Each school instagram account can only post 5 records per day - for example one at 10am, one at 12pm, one at 2pm, one at 4pm, and one at 6pm. The function should be able to assign each record with the next available posting slot for that school. The posting times should also be determined per school, via the list of the schools in a separate table.

For example - assuming School 1 & 2 both use the posting times listed above - someone submits a post to School 1 at 9:30am, and another person submits a post to school 2 at 9:45am. Both posts are scheduled for 10am, since they are for different schools and there are no other posts scheduled before them. If instead of submitting to school 2, the 2nd person submits to school 1, the first post would be scheduled for 10am, and the second would be scheduled for 12pm.

Let me know if anyone has any ideas on how to achieve this!

1 Reply 1
TheTimeSavingCo
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Assuming you have a field called 'Posting time' in your 'Submissions' table, you could try:

1. In the 'Schools' table, create a rollup field that'll show the created time of the latest submission
2. In the 'Schools' table, create a formula field that'll output the next posting time based on the value from the rollup field
3. In the 'Submissions' table, create a lookup field to display the formula field value from step 2
4. Create an automation that'll trigger whenever a Submission record has a lookup field value and an empty 'Posting time' field, and get it to paste the lookup field value into the 'Posting time' field

I think that should work, although the formula field might be tricky to figure out

Another caveat would be that this system might trip up if a lot of submissions for the same school come in at once, e.g. maybe 2 in like 5 seconds or something

For a system that wouldn't trip up I think you'd need a script that would go through all the submissions and properly calcuate timings for each of them I'm afraid