The problem
A business's communication rarely happens on a single channel these days. The same news or professional content often has to be published on social media, on the company website, and even on internal communication channels meant for colleagues.
It was no different for us: we wanted to publish each piece of content on several LinkedIn channels, on Facebook, on the website and on the internal Microsoft Teams channel.
The problem looks simple, but in everyday work it causes a lot of unnecessary effort. If every channel has to be handled separately, the same content has to be opened, copied, pasted and published several times. This takes time and also increases the chance that one of the channels gets left out.
Our goal was therefore to be able to start publishing content to several different channels from a single place.
The solution
We used Buffer to prepare and schedule LinkedIn posts and to publish them to several LinkedIn channels. The goal was to be able to send the content prepared there to further company channels as well, beyond the existing options.
For this we built our own Chrome extension that connects Buffer with the different target systems.
How it works in essence:
- We prepare the content to be published in Buffer.
- The extension regularly checks for new items waiting to be published.
- It forwards the content to the appropriate channels.
- It publishes to a personal Facebook profile using browser automation. Facebook Pages can be connected to Buffer, but personal profiles cannot, because of API restrictions; this is why this separate solution was needed.
- On the WordPress website it creates the content through the API.
- It handles internal Microsoft Teams communication with Power Automate.
This way, we did not have to develop a separate, full-fledged integration for every system. We chose the simplest working technical solution, adapted to the possibilities of each platform.
We also built a "light" version that does not publish automatically but notifies colleagues in advance about which content is about to be published.
The result
The result is a working automation, ready for live use, that reduces the manual work involved in publishing content on several channels.
One important takeaway from the project was that not every automation problem requires a large system development. In many cases, connecting a few existing services with a purpose-built add-on is enough to produce a usable solution in a short time.
From a technical point of view, it is an interesting solution because three different integration approaches work together in the same process: browser automation, direct API integration and a Power Automate-based flow.
This does not mean, however, that the whole solution can be left to an LLM. Generated solutions can make mistakes, so it remains important to set the right technical direction, to test, and to know how the individual systems are best connected.
And do we really want to give an LLM access to all of our business's communication channels?
Does this problem sound familiar?
If in your business too the same data or content has to be entered, copied or forwarded manually in several systems, the solution is not necessarily to introduce yet another large IT system.
In many cases, connecting the systems you already use in a targeted way can be enough.