Crosspost Your Blog articles to Social Media

I run this blog, a small corner of the Internet where I share my thoughts and hope to connect with others who think alike. To grow, I need to put my ideas in front of the best professionals out there. That’s not easy anymore: Google and other search engines are shifting toward AI responses. Depending on the topic, this has cut organic traffic by up to 30% for big sites. For smaller blogs like mine, it’s even worse - search engines and AI prefer authoritative sources such as Wikipedia or government websites.

So how can I get some of that traffic back to my blog?

Social Media!

I’ve already noticed that some of my articles spark more discussion outside my site - on Reddit  or Hacker News  .

I’m not a heavy Reddit user though; there’s too much noise, and scrolling through it daily to catch 1 or 2 good threads doesn’t appeal to me. On the other hand, the Fediverse ¹ feels like an exciting new world and a potential source of readers - though I could also live without constantly posting there.

So how can I stay active without wasting time manually pushing articles to every platform?

The answer is simple: I’m a DevOps. I know how to duct-tape and automate things 😉.

I found crosspost², a tool that supports many social networks. It looked like a good start, but it lacked logic for pulling fresh posts from my blog.

Inspired by indexnow-action³ (which I already use), I built my own crosspost-action  ⁴. It’s mostly a wrapper around crosspost², with added logic to fetch from a Sitemap or RSS/Atom feed, sort entries by freshness, and post them to configured social networks.

This way, I can publish new posts to my socials every day - automatically - without lifting a finger 😎.

How to set it up

I use Hugo and GitHub Actions to publish my static site. To enable crossposting, I added a workflow file: .github/workflows/crosspost.yml.

name: Crosspost recent posts to Social Media
on:
  # Uncomment for debugging
  # push:
  #   branches:
  #     - master
  schedule:
    - cron: '5 17 * * *'   # every day at 17:05 UTC
jobs:
  crosspost:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run action-crosspost on my RSS feed
        uses: tgagor/action-crosspost@v1
        with:
          dry-run: ${{ github.event_name != 'schedule' }}
          feed-url: https://gagor.pro/index.xml   # my RSS feed
          since: '1'
          since-unit: day
          mastodon-access-token: ${{ secrets.MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          mastodon-host: mastodon.social
          message: |
            New blog post: {url}

            #blog
          exclude-urls: |   # ignore these
            https://gagor.pro/
            https://gagor.pro/about/

You’ll need to define secrets for access tokens and API keys, then pass them into the action. Once configured, your posts will be published automatically.

Sitemap or RSS?

At first, I thought the Sitemap would be the perfect source for fresh posts. But Sitemaps rely on the lastmod attribute, meaning that if I update an old post, it might be republished as “new.” That can spam social feeds and annoy followers.

Instead, I switched to RSS, which uses the published date. This works much better and avoids reposting updated content.

The action also supports filters and exclusions, so you can easily fine-tune which URLs get posted.

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