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Smart Social Logo
Inspiration
Scheduling social media posts is becoming a need to maximize a business’ reach, engagement and productivity. With more than 25 million Instagram business accounts and more than 200 million small businesses using Facebook tools, how does a business owner ensure that their content reaches most of their target audience resulting in a purchase?
With more than 33% of Instagram users will make a mobile purchase, accounts posting at a time where their target audience is most active will increase their chances of revenue.
Smart Social aims to provide details on the best time to post based on your target audience’s active times and visualizations to monitor the performance of your posts.
With 690 likes for Monday’s Social Media Calendar and almost 30000 users installing a social media calendar on , we aim to facilitate and amplify marketing teams to take full control of their Facebook and Instagram publishing strategy.
What it does
Smart Social is an Instagram scheduler integration with Monday apps platform allowing social media marketers to automate posts on Instagram business profiles.
How we built it
We built our NodeJS backend which ran a cron job every minute checking to see if any of the items on the boards were overdue. If they were overdue we send a request triggering the custom instagram action. We used Facebook's Graph API to publish the actual image and caption on Instagram.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we ran into was that we thought of having a file column for the user to be able to upload an image and then the action will get the image url from Monday. This was challenging because these files are protected so we could not pass the image url to the Facebook API. As a solution, we accept the Image URL which we then use to pass it to the Facebook API. Another challenge we ran into is encrypting the Facebook and Monday long term access tokens on our database. For this we used AES-256-CBC encryption.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of creating a custom datetime trigger which fires in the same minute as desired and a custom instagram posting action. We are proud of automating Instagram posts for potentially a large audience using Monday Apps. We are proud of working across two different time zones and effectively communicating and completing tasks through a remote team.
What we learned
We learned more about the ease of use and intuitive Monday Apps framework which allowed us to build this product. We learned that challenges often arise when you start developing features, such as creating custom triggers or working around constraints such as the image url case.
What's next for Smart Social
We are looking to reach a large audience of social media marketers using Monday for their daily social media schedule.
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