How I Use ClickUp Automations for Social Media Content Creation

Once you have a workflow that is really starting to flow inside of ClickUp, it might be time to consider automating it. And to automate things in ClickUp, you need to understand how to use ClickUp automations. In this video, I'm going to teach you pretty much anything you might need to know about the Automations feature inside ClickUp. Then we're going to work together and apply that knowledge to actually build out an automated workflow for social media. Again, this is going to be one example, but you'll be able to use these same features to automate pretty much any workflow you might want to automate inside of ClickUp. Now, this video might be a bit much, especially if you're new to ClickUp and you're learning a lot of features all at once. So just know that there are tons timestamps below to help you jump to certain sections if you want to revisit this video later. But I think that's enough intro stuff. Let's dive into ClickUp and I'll show you what we're building today. So the goal of what we're going to build today is to be able to automate the process of taking a prompt for social media, moving it through all the different stages until it is a scheduled or ready to schedule post for social media. We're going to be focused on Automations inside ClickUp today. So once it's scheduled, which will be a manual process, we're not going to follow the automation further. But you could do that if you want bonus credit. But before we can even dive into starting building out each of these six Automations that we're going to need here, I want to make sure that you are actually able to follow along. And to do that, I want to make sure that in your admin settings down here in the bottom corner, if you are an admin in ClickUp, you should be able to see Qlik Apps. Now, when you click on Click Apps, it'll take you into this menu and we need to make sure that Automations are turned on so you can actually do any of the things we're going to be talking about here. These Click apps are modular features that can make ClickUp more complex or less complex based on what you turn on. And while I usually tell people to keep this very simple because we're going to be focused on Automations today, you want to make sure Automations is turned on. So go ahead and toggle this on and then we will continue with the tutorial. All right, so we turned on the Click app. Now we're ready to start automating, right? Not exactly. So like I said at the beginning, we only want to use automations once we have a strong process that really is flowing well for us. If we start automating a crappy process, we're just going to have more crappy output and that's not the situation that we want to be in. So just to get us on the same page, I'm going to show you the process that we're going to be outlining today to give you an idea of what level of detail you want to have before you start automating. Because I promise, having this little graphic that I'm going to show you here is going to make it so much easier to know what automations you need to set up. So to really get clear on what workflow we're going to be automating today, I turn to my favorite workflow mapping tool, Whimsical. Now, Whimsical is a workflow mapping tool. You can use any other tool that you might choose, Google Draw, lucidchart, or a pen and paper. But these are the main elements that I want you to get clear on before we start automating anything. The first thing is what statuses do you care about Now? Status versus stage, very confusing topic. I have a video on it here, but leave it to say this top row is what do I want to know about this? At the very high level, if I was just glancing at this task, what would I want to know about it? For me, that is almost always to do or complete, Is it done or not done? And that is what I have as my main statuses right here. Now, if I were kind of getting into the weeds and I wanted to know more details about this task, what else might I want to know? For me, that's typically what stages the task goes through, what what steps are involved in the process that are key milestones in the overall delivery of the project. So for the social media process that I'm going to be talking about today, there are five main stages that I would want to know. If I want to get into more detail. More than just the high level, I want more detail in the process. It would be these five stages. I want to know, is this social media post a prompt, meaning you haven't even responded to it, it's just an idea, Is it drafted, meaning there's a response to the prompt, but we haven't really gone much further? Is it a polished draft, meaning we've turned our response and turned it into a Almost ready to publish post. Is it an ed post, meaning everything is taken care of, we just haven't yet put it in the scheduler tool? Or is it scheduled, meaning we don't have to worry about anything here. Everything is done in this process. These two rows are going to make up your statuses and your stages. If you're not sure why I might want to break these up into two different rows, watch this video up here. It's really kind of personal preference, but I always prefer to have these two separate rows or two separate elements that I'm keeping track of in my process. Below that we have actions. Now, these are going to take the shape of descriptions or instructions inside our automated workflow. So in this case I'm just basically saying what needs to happen to move it to the next stage or status in my workflow. For me, that starts off with a prompt being created because that's what starts the whole thing. That's what creates the task that then moves through the other stages. Odds are for most of you, your process is always going to start in ClickUp with a task being created. In this case, I'm calling it prompt because that's what it equals to me. But whatever it is for you, the new YouTube idea gets created, the new service gets added, the new client gets added. That is your kickoff action. After the prompt is created, then we have a response to the prompt. And this is being done by the second person, which is denoted by the cute little characters here. So the response to the prompt is if the prompt is something like tell me about a time when the response is telling you a story about something. It's just some quick notes about an idea for potential social media posts because that's the purpose of this workflow. Once the prompt response is drafted, then we polish up that draft so it's ready to publish. We edit the post, and then we schedule the post. You can see already how these really lead into what our stages are later on. Below the action we have assignees. Now again, this might not be important for you if you're a solopreneur, but if you are running a team, odds are you have assignees involved. And for me, I always like to map out the assignees when I'm doing this kind of process map, especially if I want to automate the handoff of assignees. So here we can see in this process, one person is primarily owning all of this. And again, sorry for the cute little pictures. It was just so much easier than putting in people's profile pictures. So we have one person who's more or less in charge of this and two others who kind of jump in for specific moments in time. And yeah, there we go, assignees. That's how they're mapped out. Finally, we have the due date row. And this is the last row that I have because it's the last element of the ClickUp task that I'm really going to be customizing. And all this tells me is when should the due date be? When it's in each stage. Very important here is that I have it as a turnaround time, meaning it's not like I want it due on Saturday. Instead it's saying seven days later, two days later. And this is all going to come in handy when we're automating things down the line. Now, this is the last row that I have in my mock up right here. Because when I was doing this workflow manually, which I always suggest that you do, always do the process manually first, when I was doing this manually, these were the only fields I was using. If you have a process that relies on priority flags, tags, more custom fields, you know, whatever else you might have, you want to make sure that those are documented as rows on this process chart. I think we're all on the same page about this workflow now. Hopefully this gives you some ideas as to how you can kind of click up ify a simple workflow for automation purposes. Now we are ready to start automating. To make this a little bit easier, I'm going to do a side by side so you can see how each piece translates into a ClickUp automation. All right, so here we are in ClickUp with a list view and we should have everything pretty much set up the way we need to be set up to start with, because we should have been doing this process manually already. So just to check, just to make sure everything that we need to is here, we're going to go through each row and make sure that that row is available in ClickUp. The very first row that we want to check to make sure we have is our statuses. So to do and complete are the two statuses that we want for this workflow. And I can easily see that to do and complete are indeed our status. I could check that by going into here and clicking Manage status just to make sure, but I'm pretty confident we have this correct. Next up, we want to make sure that our row of custom fields is indeed added in there. So the dropdown, custom field of prompt and so on. It does look like we have this Here. Now, if you don't have this already added, you could go into the plus icon and add a new dropdown custom field, give it a name of stage and list out each stage. So I had prompt edited, so on and so forth. I like to add a little just typed out like a 1 out of 5, 2 out of 5 just to help me keep track of where I'm at. But you can see I already have this added in here, so there's not much more I need to do. The next row we need to check is the action row. Are these instructions of prompt created? Prompt response, are they added in ClickUp? Now if I was using subtasks here, where I had subtask equals, you know, prompt created, subtask 2 equals prompt response, I could say yes, these are already in here. But because they're not, this tells me that this is something that my automation needs to help me out with and something that we should probably be building out when we build our automation. The last two fields we have are assignee and due date and clearly those are always added to tasks in ClickUp. So it is very easy for us to say yes, we have them, we can just move right along. Now that we have our ClickUp enabled, we have our workflow mapped, we made sure that all the fields that need to be added are added. It is finally time to start automating. So to dive in we need to click on the Automations robot head in the top right corner. Click Add Automations here and you will be able to see how you can create a new automation and ClickUp. Up at the top you'll see the three other tabs that are included in the Automations area. Very important is the User Usage area. This usage tab shows you how many actions you have used inside your ClickUp workspace in the last month or this month, really the month that you are in. So for the account that you have, you're going to have a certain limit here. I will just say on the ClickUp plan comparison website, if you're going into the pricing information, you'll be able to see the automation limits per account type. So depending on what plan you're on, that's how many you get per month resets every month. This is for how many actions that you have set up with Automation. Every time an automation action occurs, you are using using up 1 in your quota of automations allowed. If you need to buy more, you can. For most folks who are at least on the lowest tier paid plan, I doubt you're going to run into that unless you're really automating a lot of things through ClickUp itself. Beyond usage, we have manage where we can manage existing automations and then we have browse where we can create one from scratch. So the very first automation that we want to create from scratch here is the very first action that we want to have occur. And this is going to be when task is created, then do whatever we want it to do. Now if we go into browse, we can create automations from scratch, but I've actually already created most of these, so we're just going to go in and edit the existing ones one by one. The very first automation we need to create here is this one. When a task is created and the status is to do and the social stages prompt, then change the assignee to Layla. Okay, so this is that very first kind of kickoff of it. So the prompt being created, we don't have any automations there. That's just something that someone is going to do. But this first automation transfers it from that person's job into my job to then make the response to the prompt. Now to break down how exactly this is working. Our very first when on the left side of the automation is saying when should this occur? Task creation, that's pretty straightforward, right? We want this to happen when a task is created. The next piece is actually a condition. It's not another when it's saying, okay, a task is created and the status is to do. We are basically narrowing down the trigger to make sure that this only occurs when the task is created created and it's in the to do status. We don't care if a task is created, but it's already complete, we don't care. So adding this condition just narrows it down. So this automation only triggers when we really want it to. You'll notice I've also added one more trigger here, which is a custom field, meaning when a task is created and the status is to do and the custom field is this first custom field option, then this triggers again. We're narrowing it down even further. The right side is a little bit more straightforward. These are all actions, no matter how many you add, which you can add up to three. These are just things that happen because of the trigger. When the trigger side is triggered, the stuff on the right side of your screen occurs. So that is the action. Steps of change, assignee. I could have it, you know, apply a template, create a subtask, whatever thing we want to have it do. That is the right side of the equation. When we are feeling good about this automation, we can read the summary at the bottom to confirm it's doing what we think it's supposed to do and then click Save. By default it'll probably turn on because I had it off before. I will need to turn it on just to make sure it is functional. So just always make sure that you have the automations turned on if you want them to work. And one pro tip I should add here. You'll notice that I have the condition of this custom field being set. The reason I'm using that option is because I've paired it with another feature in ClickUp which bonus fun fact of the day here. I just want to show you this because this is very helpful for those of you who use these kinds of stage dropdown fields. Inside this field I actually have a setting set up. So that way this is a required field for all tasks. I don't care about subtasks for this point because I might use them for something else. But if anyone creates a task, they will not be allowed to do so unless they have two, but especially this one. This field filled out, it is required. And so that way, because it's required, it's a really good one for me to base my automations on because I know it's going to be filled out. All right, but that is the first automation. There's your little fun fact along the way and we are ready to dig into the second one. So we so far we got from prompt created to prompt response drafted, these pieces of to do prompt and prompt created. This is all manual at this point and even the assignee isn't even counted in the system because it's just being created. It's not really a task at that point. All right, but once we get to prompt response drafted, meaning the first assignment goes to me, I do my thing, then it's ready to move on to the next stage. And this is going to be an automation that we're going to use frequently throughout the rest of the process. So I promise it's going to get a lot faster from here on the left side, the when side of the equation we have when custom field changes, that's it. That's the only trigger. So when the custom field changes from anything, it doesn't matter what it was before to drafted, then we want to trigger this automation. This is basically saying when someone switches it to the next step in the process, then trigger this automation. Very simple. So what happens when that trigger occurs is the then side the actions and we have three unique actions happening every time this trigger occurs. The first one is the assignee changes. We remove myself as an assignee and we add the next person in line, the person who is the owl on our little chart here. Then we have a comment being added. And this is just the add a comment feature. No special things going on here. And our comment says this social post is drafted. Please turn notes into a polished reader friendly post and when you're done, move it to the editing stage for review. What this is doing is this is providing the action row. So remember back here where we talked about how, oh, we don't really have a good spot for the action? Well, that's because we're not using subtasks and we don't have a lot of details in our task description. We're going to just draft in the description. So we're leaving that nice and blank. So to automate the instructions of what to do next, we're using assigned comments. Now we could use subtasks, we could use checklists. I find assigned comments very simple. So that's what we're using here. So this is going to go out every time that automation triggers and this assigned comment is including what just happened, what needs to be done, and what to do when you are done with your step in the process. And I think this is just a very good framework for assigned comments as instructions. What happened before, what do you need to do, and what needs to happen next. Once we have that assigned comment trigger out, we have one last automation here which is just changing the due date and that's using this number here that we put into our flowchart map. And it's just saying when this all happens, make the due date seven days later. So whenever this trigger occurs, whenever it moves into this next status, change the due date to be seven days later. This gives the OWL person, the next person in line, seven days to complete the next step of the process. Does that make sense? I hope it does. This actually isn't as complicated as it feels. And when you start setting it up and you see the dropdowns, it's really quite intuitive. So that is the automation summary at the bottom. We can read over that to make sure it all makes sense. Click Save and once again make sure this is turned on before we move on to the next step. By now we have a draft turned into a post and now we're ready to actually edit the post. Unfortunately, automations at this point in time cannot be cloned or they can be included in templates, but they can't be templated separately. So we manually need to recreate almost the exact same automation again for when it moves into the next stage of the process. And that looks like this. When the custom field changes to the next stage in the process, change the assignee again, add a new instruction comment and change the due date again. This time we're doing a two day turnaround because that's what we have in our flowchart. I'm going to save that there, we're going to turn that on and we're going to go to the next stage. And guess what? Once again we have the same exact thing here. We have a stage triggering the automation. When it is triggered, we again change the assignee, add a comment with instructions and change the due date again. This is how we're managing handoffs all in one task with no need to use subtasks because we just want to have this kind of flow in the background and not be a high pressure pre planned process. But before we get into those last two automations, you're going to need just a quick reminder that if this has been helpful to you at all, I would really appreciate you leaving a thumbs up or a comment below. Those things help this video perform in the YouTube algorithm and they cost you nothing. Also, this is automation month on the channel here. So we are releasing a whole bunch of videos about automations in ClickUp. So if you enjoy that kind of content, check out the playlist we have for this month's content so you don't miss a single video. All right, so back to these last two automations that we're going to need to have set up. The first one reflects the very last piece of our workflow chart here where we have scheduled and complete. Basically when a video is scheduled, it's finished. That's the detail stage for being finished, but it's also complete. And sometimes when we're using stages in our ClickUp workflow, people can forget to use the status or vice versa. If you're using the status, people can sometimes forget to use use the stage. In this whole workflow we've been instructing people at every single point to only use the stage. And so to make sure that our status stays in sync with that stage, we want to set up an automation just to check on everything. So this first check on everything automation is as follows. When the social stage gets to scheduled, change the status to complete. It's that simple. And whenever that happens, we're going to change the overall task to be marked complete. That way we don't have to tell people, you know, Change the stage. Except for this point where you have to change the status, we don't have to give them that confusion. We're consistently telling them changes the stage and we have the automation running in the background just to make sure that the overall task gets marked complete. So that is the second to last automation we need just to kind of monitor things and keep our statuses and stages in sync. The very last automation is very similar, although this one is more of a negative, it's more of a reinforcement. So what happens if somebody does accidentally mark the task complete when it's in one of these early stages? Maybe they're not familiar with the idea that we're using stages here. They don't read the assigned comment. That kind of confusion can really screw up this workflow. Because if a task gets marked complete too early, well it doesn't move through the rest of the process and other people don't know it's their turn to pick it up. That's one reason that people will use suntasks instead of this kind of automated method. Just so it's all clear, but we can make automations work by adding one more automation here. This is an enforcement automation. Basically it says when the status changes from anything to complete, meaning the task is marked complete and the custom field social stage, our stage is not scheduled. Then we have an action now to explain this trigger just in a little bit more detail. It basically just says if the stage is not scheduled we cannot mark this task complete. And it enforces that because if it does happen we have the status change back to to do. We say nuh, rejected, go back to to do. And we have in a comment come out saying hey we can't do this here, you have to change the stage first. This is just holding your people accountable and helping them keep an eye on whether they should be using the stage or the status. This comment is telling them hey, you can't do this, you have to use the stage. We could even add an additional note here saying the automation will mark it complete when it's done. This just provides some explanation and discipline if you will, to make sure that your automations don't break by human error, which you know is the most common reason that automations would break. Now if this gets to be annoying and sometimes you skip stages in the process and you don't want this to always be such a strong reinforcement, you could also change it. So that way rather than kicking it back and sending an error message, instead it just fixes it for you. So we could say if this happens if people mark it complete early. We're just going to assume that the person is correct, not the system. And we're going to say, all right, if that happens, we're just going to automatically change our stage to scheduled and we're going to not worry about it anymore. Do you see how this is kind of the inverse of the automation I just showed you? The first one rejected the input and told them to fix it. This one trusted the person over the system and said, alright, well if you think it's done, it must be done. This second one I would only do if you have really experienced ClickUp users or you're a team of one. Otherwise I would stick with the first method which assumes the system is correct over the person. Sorry people, we're just not as good as technology. Now once we have that turned on, we have an automation that will take our tasks from one stage to the next, using automations at each step to tell the next person in line what they need to do. But to make this a little bit more visual, I'm probably going to switch to a board view just because I like to see things that way. And I'm going to group things by my stage just because it's going to look a lot clearer than grouping it by statuses here. So I'm going to do group by custom field social stage. So now we have this board view grouped by our dropdown custom field, which looks very similar to a status. And we can see all of our ideas on this board visually right here. If we had images attached to each of the tasks, we could even choose to show those images. So we have a visual indication of what content is showing up, where, and what does it exactly look like. But in short, okay, not so short. In long, this is how you would automate a workflow using ClickUp Automations. You would turn on the automations. You would map your workflow using rows for each element of the automation that you need to adjust. You would set up your automations, you would test your automations, then you would roll out the automations to your team. This is how you take a workflow from being either a bunch of subtasks or some manual instructions and manual movement to being fully automated just based on using six, in this case, six simple automations that you could set up even if you were on the free account. Now this was a pretty long video and it took me and my editor a long time to get this all polished up. So thank you Thomas for getting this all organized. But if you found this video helpful at all. We'd really appreciate it if you leave a comment below and give this video a thumbs up. You can also while you're down there, save this video to your own Watch later list. All those things are going to make it easier for you to find this video later and they help this video perform in the YouTube algorithm so more people see our content. And after we spend so much time on this free content, it would really be helpful if you would pay for this content by engaging with it in some way. Now if you'd like to go even further with Automations more than we're doing in this month of Automation tutorials, be sure to check out the link in the description below for how you can work with me in my membership, our course or one on one. So all those links are in the description below. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for watching this video. Until next time, enjoy the process. Us.