Auto-publish social videos to 9 platforms via Google Sheets and Blotato

ASCN.AI makes it possible to publish videos to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, and Reddit from a Google Sheets row in an automated fashion. One Google Sheets entry triggers the simultaneous posting of that video on each of those 9 platforms with each platform receiving its own caption created by GPT-4o. Deployment to the ASCN.AI system can occur within 48 hours. The monthly subscription cost for running ASCN.AI is approximately $54-$64 per month.

To auto-publish your videos to all 9 social media platforms from Google Sheets, you will follow these steps:

1. Create the Google Sheet row with the video URL, content brief, and have the status set to "pending."
2. The automation runs on a cron schedule (every 1-3 hours), and picks up the first pending row.
3. Once the pending row is picked up, GPT-4o will generate the 9 platform specific captions from the content brief in that row.
4. The video and the 9 captions will be sent to Blotato, which will then publish them at the same time to all 9 platforms.
5. Once the 9 platforms receive the video and captions, the status of the Google Sheet row will be updated to "published" (or "error" with the error message if the platform has failed).

You have a video you want to publish on 9 different social media platforms. Publishing it manually on all 9 platforms can take 45-90 minutes for each video every time you do it, meaning that with daily publishing of 20-30 videos a month per person across 9 social platforms, man hours wasted for copy-pasting will add up to 20-30 working hours with no strategic value added to your social media strategy/month.

With ASCN.AI’s subscription model costing approximately $54/month, you can eliminate 20-30 hours of monthly copy-pasting into using a 30-second workflow in Google Sheets (1 row = publishing to all 9 platforms simultaneously) where each of those 9 platforms receives their own GPT-4o written caption instead of copy-paste of the same text with a few minor edits, like most companies do. Here’s the basic information:

• Platform Support: You can use ASCN.AI to automatically publish to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, and Reddit.
• Publishing Tool - Google Sheets: You can use Google Sheets as a publishing queue. Each row represents a unique video in your account. In order to publish a video, simply fill out the URL of the video, provide a content brief for the video, and set the status column for that video to "pending". The automation process will then take over.
• Triggers: The automation process runs on a cron schedule (configured to occur every 1 to 3 hours). Each time the cron process runs, it will return a maximum of one row marked "pending". Therefore, if you have 10 videos pending, you will receive 10 different messages through the automation system until all rows are processed. This was done intentionally so that posting more than one video at a time would be viewed as "spamming" to the platform’s algorithm.

5-Step Workflow

1. Cron Trigger Scans for Pending Videos

Whenever the cron trigger executes, it will retrieve all rows in your google sheets that contain "pending" as a value under the status column, and return the first video with that status; if there are no pending videos, the workflow ends here.

2. Extract Video URL from Google Sheets and Transfer to Blotato

Once ASCN.AI receives the video URL (from your publicly viewable Google Drive folder), it will then send this URL to Blotato’s API, which will use this URL to upload the video to each of your social platforms. n8n doesn't directly communicate with TikTok and LinkedIn, but Blotato does. Through n8n's orchestration and Blotato's publishing, ASCN.AI will connect & maintain all content.

3. GPT-4o Will Create Platform-Specific Captions

Most do-it-yourself automation doesn't take this into account. The same caption won't work across nine different publishing platforms because Twitter/X has a maximum of 280 characters, while YouTube has a maximum of 5,000 character descriptions. The first line of a TikTok caption should contain a hook; however, the first line of a LinkedIn description should be more formal and professional than the first line of a Twitter/X description. Finally, when posting to Reddit, you should match the tone and culture of the subreddit to avoid getting your post deleted.

Upon receiving the content brief as provided on the row of the content sheet, GPT-4o produces nine captions based on character count and culture for their respective platforms. ASCN.AI configures the prompts used for each platform upon deployment. This step by itself saves between 30 and 45 minutes for each cohesive video batch.

4. Publishing to All Nine Platforms in Parallel

The workflow splits into nine branch nodes, firing asynchronously. At the same time that TikTok publishes the video, so do Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, and Reddit. In addition, from the very beginning of this automation process, the branch nodes have been isolated for error handling, so if an error is returned from TikTok's API, then the other eight have continued to function correctly.

5. Writing the Status Back to the Sheet

After all nine branch nodes have completed publishing the video, the workflow returns to the original row of the content and changes the status of that row according to the outcome of the publishing process. If a video had been successfully published, the status of this row is now set to "published" along with the date/time it was published. In the case that a video was not successfully published, the status will show an error along with a description of the specific API error returned. Your content sheet will have the most up-to-date information at all times.

9 Different Platforms: Where Does What Go?

ASCN.AI has the capability to publish to nine different social platforms simultaneously: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, & Reddit. Every social media platform will receive a unique GPT-4o-generated caption that meets the specific style and size requirements of their platform.

Short-Form Video: TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts

• All of these platforms want vertical video in 9:16 aspect ratio.
• All three of these platforms use algorithms to determine what videos will be seen.
• While TikTok supports videos up to 10 minutes in length and 4 Gigabytes (GB) in size, the platforms "For You" page places a strong emphasis on video clips that are between 15 and 60 seconds long.
• On Instagram Reels, the maximum video length in the Reels feed is 90 seconds.
• YouTube Shorts must be less than 60 seconds long to be eligible for the Shorts algorithm. Captions on all three platforms will have different stylistic requirements.

Professional Networks: LinkedIn and Twitter/X

• Video posted on LinkedIn will generally be viewed from a professional commentary perspective rather than marketing speak. LinkedIn supports videos up to 10 minutes long and a maximum of 5 GB in size.
• However, Twitter/X has a 2-minute, 20-second video limit for all standard user accounts and a 512 MB limit on file size.
• Each platform has a very different character budget:
  • LinkedIn: 3,000 characters
  • Twitter/X: 280 characters
• To provide the appropriate caption format for these two platforms, there will be 2 separate GPT-4o prompts.

Community Platforms: Facebook, Threads, Pinterest and Reddit

Platform Video Format Specifications

Manage Your Publishing from Google Sheets

The Required Field Schema

Optional columns: platforms (used to publish to a subset), scheduled_for (to be published at a specific date). Since every social media network, like reddit has its own guidelines that must be followed in order for posts to be accepted or removed, the different styles of posting to each network can vary somewhat (for instance, the expectations for how a video is created will differ when posting to TikTok than when posting to LinkedIn, and this will dictate whether the post has many or few hashtags). For instance, here is the same content outline created three distinct ways.

Content Outline: "Demo our automation tool that posts videos to 9 different social networks from 1 single spreadsheet!"

• TikTok: "I used to waste 2 hours of my life reposting each video to 9 separate social media platforms, now thanks to this automation tool, it only takes me 30 seconds! #automation #contentcreator #socialmedia #productivity"
• LinkedIn: "Most content producers each spend 20-30 hours/month manually posting content across multiple social media networks by copying/pasting 1 piece of content. We have developed a system that enables you to cross post from a single row of a spreadsheet. Contact us if you would like us to explain how the system works!"
• YouTube: "Auto-post videos to 9 Social Media networks from a Google sheet using Blotato's automated workflows and Blotato's API. All of this includes creating the workflows from start to finish; generating network specific captions using GPT-o; error handling; and tracking each posts status using ASCN.AI services at: https://ascn.ai".

Blotato: The Publishing API that ties everything together

Blotato is an API for publishing video content through social media platforms. We use the official APIs of each network for authentication and posting our content on all platforms. To be able to use our automated services, members of our Starter Plan ($29/month) must sign up before they can use this feature.

Pricing For Blotato's Plans You'll Be Using

The only way to get the automation feature using Blotato is by signing up for either the Starter or Creator Plan.

ASCN.AI Managed Deployment or Self Deployment?

ASCN.AI can have you set up to auto publish video content across all 9 social media platforms within 48 hours. If you set up everything by yourself from beginning to end, it will likely take you approximately 13-23 hours (by using n8n with community nodes) to create connections between each platform. You will also need to create social media OAuth connection for each of the 9 networks as well as setup a TikTok Developer App.

FAQs

Does this Work For Any Video Format?

As long as your video can be shared PUBLICLY AND HAS A DIRECT URL to your video on the internet, Blotato will perform correctly according to each networks' requirements. The best ratio is a 9:16 vertical mp4. For LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, a 16:9 horizontal must be used but will receive letterboxing on the other platforms that require posts primarily be vertical.

Can I Post To Less Than Nine Networks?

Yes. You may disable one or more platforms in the platform nodes, or you can have an additional column within your Google Sheet defining which platform(s) each individual row relates to.

What Happens If A Network Fails to Publish?

Each of the 8 other networks will still be able to publish content without any problem. Each network operates independently and therefore, a network specific message will be written to the error log on the row of the failed network.

Is this Process Compliant With TikTok and Instagram Terms Of Service?

Yes. All automation performed by Blotato uses the official API integrations provided by each of the individual networks for publishing video content. All published video content via this automation process will create the same OAuth connection to TikTok as do other online publishing tools and apps such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later. There are no instances of browser automation and therefore, no scraping will occur through this process.