Filling a Social Media calendar by query

[jaydeflix (John Eddy)]

To start: I’m technical but relatively new to Monday. I’m working as a social media manager/strategist and I’m trying to build out a Social Media calendar in Monday because Monday is where a lot of my source content is going to be coming from. Our SME for Monday left so I figured I’d throw this out here so people could point and laugh at me and say lolno =)

We have a couple different content calendars for specific things that we’ll want to amplify on social media—Let’s say Blog Posts, podcast episodes, and YouTube videos.

Those other calendars are more traditional project management boards with in progress, completed, etc., including ‘projected publish date.’

I’m setting up a content calendar with a few different campaigns. One for Blogs Posts, one for Podcasts, one for YouTube, one for ‘Holidays/Internet Observances’, etc.

What I’d like to do is autopopulate the Blog posts section with specific fields from the Blog Posts content board. I don’t want to replicate the information, I don’t need to store it in the calendar, I just want a view of what social will look like in general for my management chain, and for me to get to see it all in one place.

I’m not planning on pushing out of monday directly to social (for numerous reasons). I’m just trying to make this as simple as possible so for anything the other content teams are working on will auto-populate and shift around as they do their work.

If this was a database app, I’d simply have the ‘Blog Posts’ category be populated with a SQL query.

Hopefully this makes a little bit of sense =)

[Dani (Dani Lester)]

Hi @jaydeflix

Welcome to the Community!
Whilst I can’t see your exact workflow or board set up, based on your post above I wonder if the following could be an option for you?

We have The Connect Boards Column and The Mirror Column. These two column types can be used together to allow you to reflect information from one board to another.
The advantage of this is that you are not duplicating the data, but rather seeing the original data just mirrored on to a second board.

This also means that any changes made to the data will automatically be reflected in the mirror columns too. You can even change the data directly from the second board in the mirror column and it will change the original board too.

You can use an automation to have these links set up automatically when certain values match:

Could this be an option for you?

Best,

Dani

[jaydeflix (John Eddy)]

Hmm. So I played around with Connected Tables and Mirror Columns and I’m not 100% sure they’re going to work, but let me try showing you what I’m working with. This is the board I’ve built:

Now, three of those (Whitepapers, Company Blog Posts, Exec Blog Posts) are all handled by different teams with their own boards. I’ve trimmed down the fields (and haven’t really created everything I wanted yet) because I want to make sure what I want to do can be done =).

What I’d like to do is take the (uncreatively named) Content Calendar that the Company Blog Post team uses and feed it into my board, specifically into the Company Blog Post group. The Whitepaper Launch board would populate the Whitepapers group.

Each of the other boards I want to pull from have their own publish date field that I’d feed into a date field, same with URL, title… not sure I need more than those tbh. Holidays/Internet Observances would be campaigns I add myself.

Based on what I’ve tried with Connected Tables, it doesn’t look like it has the ability to funnel like that. It’d be more useful if I was a PM of PMs and wanted a dashboard look at all of their projects to see where we were as an org?

[jaydeflix (John Eddy)]

Ah, and now that i dig in and watched the video on https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000635139-The-Connect-Boards-Column, it doesn’t look like connected boards is the solution for me.

I don’t want to do actions to pull in the data, I want projects added to the Content Calendar/Whitepaper boards to automatically appear on my board (tho maybe there’s an automation that will auto-add it).

Like, this is a redacted version of part of our Whitepaper board:

I want a subset of those columns to automatically be on my social calendar board under a ‘Whitepaper’ group (I don’t need all the information that’s on the actual Whitepaper board, just things like Launch Date, WIP, a link back to the original item so I can get everything). As new whitepapers get added to that process, I just want them to automatically appear on my board. If a date changes, I want that change to be reflected on my board.

ETA: So, I’m toying with this automation:

and one issue I’m finding is that since the item gets saved really fast, if I try to push fields with this:

the default name gets pushed because the items automatically save in the initial board, which means I get this in my calendar:

As you can see, I’m getting things populating in the right places, and the updated name is showing up in the connected board section (Junk Campaign, test, and workworkwork) while the first column just shows New Campaign. This makes the calendar view kind of weird:

So I guess the question is how can I get the first column in the Social calendar to auto-update as the linked item’s name changes? OR, is there a way to set a ‘priority’ for how things should be labeled in the calendar, like ‘John Test Board, or if blank, John’s Second Test Board, or if blank, ’?

[jennap (Jenna)]

Hey @jaydeflix

If what you specifically need is to see a full calendar of dates from across several boards while staying updated with the changes made to these items and dates, I would actually recommend using a Dashboard instead.

Specifically, I think The Calendar Widget would be very helpful in showing you all of the dates you need across these boards. You can also filter either the individual widget or dashboard as a whole to only showing items with specific statuses, people assigned, etc.

If you also want to physically see these items in a table-like view, you can do the same filtering as needed but this time on The Table Widget.

By using a dashboard, you can still show all of the items and dates you need in one spot without having to set up automations on several boards and make sure that mirror columns are set up properly to keep everything updated accordingly.

I hope this helps! Remember to mark as solved if this answers your question

Cheers,
Jenna

[Dani (Dani Lester)]

Hi @jaydeflix!

It look like this post here Filling a Social Media calendar by query - #5 by jennap might have answered your question, is that correct?

If so, please don’t forget to mark it as the solution so other users can easily find it, and to close this thread
If not, feel free to ask any additional questions you have!

Best,
Dani

[Dani (Dani Lester)]

Hi @jaydeflix

I hope the answers in this thread are useful!
As we haven’t had any updates here, I’m going to go ahead and mark this thread as solved.
This means that the thread will close in 7 days time

If you have any additional questions or you feel your original query wasn’t resolved, please feel free to let us know and we’ll be happy to continue to assist!

Best,

Dani