With Uncanny Automator, you can automate posts from WordPress site to the groups you manage on Facebook. Automatically push new posts from your WordPress blog to your Facebook group, or post links and photos to your group when users perform specific actions on your website…you could even do things like automatically posting a congratulatory message when a user completes a LearnDash course or joins a membership!
If you have the free version of Uncanny Automator, you’ll first need to connect your site with a free Uncanny Automator account, which will give you 250 free credits to use with Facebook Groups and other app integrations. If you have Uncanny Automator Pro, simply activate your Pro license key to get unlimited usage of the Facebook Groups integration.
Once you’ve connected your free account or activated your Pro license key, return to the recipe page and click the Facebook Groups icon. Due to the way the Facebook API works, there are two distinct steps to setting up the Facebook Groups integration:
- Connect the Uncanny Automator app to your Facebook group. This step is required to give Uncanny Automator access to the group.
- Connect the Uncanny Automator app to your Facebook account. This gives the Uncanny Automator the ability to post to the group on your behalf.
Connecting the Uncanny Automator app to your Facebook group
Before you get started, you’ll need to be an Admin of the Facebook group you want Uncanny Automator to post to. When you’ve confirmed you have the admin role, navigate to the group and click Group Settings in the sidebar:
On the Group Settings page, scroll to the very bottom of the page. You’ll see a section for Apps:
Once you click that, search for Automator and install the Uncanny Automator app:
You’ll see the permissions you’re granting to the app. Click Add:
Connect the Uncanny Automator app to your Facebook account
In this step, you’ll connect the Uncanny Automator app to your Facebook account so that Uncanny Automator can post to the group on your behalf.
On the Add recipe screen, click Add Action and then click the the Facebook Groups icon:
You should see a dialog appear with a link to connect your Facebook account to Uncanny Automator.
Click Connect account, which opens the Facebook settings page in a new window, then click Connect Facebook account.
This launches into the process of connecting your Facebook account with our Uncanny Automator Facebook app, which is what enables Uncanny Automator to post updates using your Facebook account. Here are the screens you’ll see:
In this step, choose which Facebook groups you want Uncanny Automator to be able to post updates to:
If you’d like to customize the groups available to Uncanny Automator, click Choose what you allow. This will enable you to select specific groups to provide Uncanny Automator access to:
Clicking Done on the last screen brings you back to your site, where you can view info about the connected account:
Close the popup windows, and your recipe page will reload and you can now add the desired Facebook groups action to your recipe:
That’s it! You can now automatically add posts, images or links to your Facebook group when new posts are published to your WordPress site, or even when new pages, courses, products, etc. are created. You could even post updates when when users complete milestones on your site as a way to celebrate their successes…the possibilities are endless.
Refreshing access tokens
Unlike Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups unfortunately restricts app access to groups to only 60 days. This means that at least once every 60 days, you must reauthorize Automator to post to your group. A reminder will automatically show up in Automator within 7 days of token expiration to remind you to perform the reauthorization.
To refresh access tokens, simply disconnect and reconnect the Facebook Groups connection from Automator > Settings > App integrations > Facebook Groups. This will take care of reauthorization.
