Automation Highlight: Sharing YouTube to Buffer with Zapier

Recently I wrote about how I’m automating more of my tasks, especially around the podcast. One of the best ways to dip your toe in the waters of automation is social media posting, and Buffer is a fantastic tool for that. In this automation highlight, I’m going to show you how I automatically share from YouTube to Buffer, using Zapier.

The Connections: YouTube and Buffer

First we need to make the connections. Luckily, connecting both YouTube and Buffer to Zapier are easy enough, and you can do them as you add the triggers and actions.

We connect YouTube so that we can have Zapier watch our channel for new videos. This uses the “New Video in Channel” trigger.

The action is posting to various accounts I have connected to Buffer. You can’t have a single action post to multiple social accounts, so this step needs to be repeated.

The Middle Step: Saving to Pocket

A small middle step I have in this zap is saving to Pocket and tagging it as “newsletter.” This triggers a different automation I’ll talk about in a later post, but it makes things much easier for compiling my Monday morning newsletter.

Saving to Buffer

As I mentioned earlier, you can’t post to multiple accounts in a single action step, so you need to set up a single action for each account you want to post to.

While this can be annoyingly repetitive, it does allow you to get around the Twitter constraint of not being able to post the same thing to 2 different Twitter handles.

Another great thing about connecting YouTube to Zapier is they grab the thumbnail for you to share as an image. In the action above you can see my format is:

New Video: [VIDEO TITLE] [VIDEO URL]

Then for the photo URL, I use the video’s thumbnail.

I’ll repeat this for each of my Twitter accounts, my 2 Facebook pages, and LinkedIn.

Wrapping Up

Using Buffer to automatically post my YouTube videos makes sharing across multiple accounts a lot easier. It’s also something I don’t have to think about any more. I also know that based on my Buffer sharing times, the same video is shared at several optimal times.