Up until March of this year, roughly 42% of people clicking through from our social posts were ending up on expired or closed job listings. I run QualityAssuranceJobs.com, a site that aggregates software testing positions and shares them on social media. For anyone actively job hunting in a tough market, that kind of dead end is incredibly discouraging. And for us — a community focused on getting QA roles in front of the right candidates as quickly as possible — it meant our social distribution was actually working against our mission.
Speed is everything: show someone a fresh role before it closes. But we had outgrown the workflow that was supposed to enable that, and the delay between "job is published" and "job is posted to social" had stretched enough to noticeably hurt our community.
So we built a new workflow to solve it — and here’s what happened to our traffic after we did.
Why we had to move on from our old setup
For a long time, we relied on Zapier to power our social distribution, and it served us well. Zapier is an excellent product, and I'm genuinely impressed they manage the massive number of integrations they offer.
However, our specific workflow had three separate components, each adding its own delay. First was our publishing platform's RSS feed, which was never meant to act as a real-time stream for a live job board. Updates appeared when they appeared. Then Zapier polled that RSS feed, introducing additional lag. Finally, the Zapier-to-Buffer connection — our only bridge to…