Weekly
Get a weekly list of unscheduled Buffer ideas
Every Friday I get my Buffer ideas and drafts that still aren't scheduled.
- Runs
- Weekly
- Apps
- Buffer
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- API key
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every Friday at 3pm, email me my Buffer ideas and drafts that haven't been scheduled yet, grouped by channel.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
Buffer's ideas area is where good content goes to be forgotten. Someone jots down a post angle during a meeting, a teammate saves a customer quote, the manager drops in a link to share later, and a few months on there are fifty ideas and drafts nobody has looked at. Meanwhile, the calendar is thin and the team says it has nothing to post.
Once a week, ClickRuntime lists the ideas and drafts in your Buffer account and emails you the list. Since it comes on a regular day, it becomes a prompt to plan the next batch of posts and to pick up the ideas that are still worth publishing rather than creating everything from scratch.
Solo marketers, small brand teams and creators who capture ideas faster than they publish them find it keeps those ideas visible.
What you get out of it
Good ideas get published instead of lost
A weekly reminder brings unused material back in front of you. Pieces that took real thought to capture end up as posts instead of fading in a tab. Calendar gaps shrink when planning is tied to a fixed day.
Blank-calendar panic is reduced
When you sit down to plan the week, a list of ready ideas is already in your inbox. Starting from a list is much easier than starting from nothing. Starting from a list is much easier than starting from a blank page, and the calendar fills without the usual scramble.
Content captured by colleagues is used
Teammates and clients who add ideas see them come back and be acted on. That encourages everyone to keep contributing, which improves the overall quality of your pipeline. Teammates who add ideas see them come back and be acted on, which encourages everyone to keep contributing, and the overall quality of your pipeline improves as a result.
Stale items are noticed
Ideas that sit for months become obvious in a regular list. You can delete what has expired and focus on the pieces that are still timely. Ideas that sit for months become obvious in a regular list, so you can delete what has expired and focus on pieces that are still timely.
A steady planning rhythm
Receiving the digest on the same day each week turns content planning into a habit. Regular planning produces a calmer, more consistent publishing schedule. Regular planning produces a calmer, more consistent publishing schedule, and it keeps the ideas folder from turning into a graveyard.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Once a week, ClickRuntime collects your Buffer ideas and any draft posts that are not scheduled yet.
It groups the drafts by channel and puts ideas without a channel in their own group.
You get one email listing everything still waiting, so you can plan next week's posts. If there is nothing, the email says so.
Before it runs live
- Connect Buffer
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Buffer steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from collections import defaultdict
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, notify, http
ORG_ID = "your-organization-id"
def buffer(query, variables=None):
resp = http.post("https://api.buffer.com", json={"query": query, "variables": variables or {}},
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.secret('BUFFER_API_KEY')}"})
resp.raise_for_status()
return resp.json()["data"]
@on_trigger
def run(event):
data = buffer("query($org: OrganizationId!) { "
"ideas(input: {organizationId: $org}) { edges { node { content { title text } } } } "
"posts(input: {organizationId: $org, filter: {status: [draft]}}) "
"{ edges { node { text channel { name } } } } }", {"org": ORG_ID})
groups = defaultdict(list)
for e in data["ideas"]["edges"]:
c = e["node"]["content"]
groups["Ideas (no channel)"].append(c.get("title") or c["text"][:100])
for e in data["posts"]["edges"]:
groups[e["node"]["channel"]["name"]].append(e["node"]["text"][:100])
body = "\n\n".join(f"{name}\n" + "\n".join(f"- {t}" for t in items) for name, items in groups.items())
notify.email_me("Buffer ideas and drafts", body or "No unscheduled ideas or drafts.")
return {"items": sum(len(v) for v in groups.values())}FAQ
Common questions
Does it include drafts as well as ideas?
Will the email grow very long if I have hundreds of ideas?
Does it change anything in my Buffer account?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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