Starting Small With A Single Airtable Table
If you have never touched Airtable before the thing that will break your brain a little is that at first it just feels like a spreadsheet but the moment you try to use it for publishing workflows you start to notice weird little details like how checkboxes and single select fields behave totally differently when you filter them. I started my repurposing pipeline by making just one table called Content Master and dumped everything in — ideas that were half baked, transcripts, blog posts that only existed as rough notes, even screenshots I needed for posts. I just used a big Long Text field called Raw Content and another field called Status with options like Draft Ready To Edit and Published. The first trap I hit right away was that Airtable Views will happily keep showing content you don’t care about if you forget that filters are applied at the view level not the table. I had a moment where I published the same piece twice because I was looking at a view called To Schedule but it was accidentally showing items that had already been marked Published ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Building Multiple Airtable Views For Each Stage
Once my single view got too messy I started using what Airtable calls Views which are basically saved filters and layouts. I made a view called Idea Intake that only showed records where Status = Draft and another called Editing Queue where Status = Ready To Edit. This way I could jump between them when my brain felt like editing vs drafting. The critical thing here for a repurposing pipeline is making a view for each stage of content recycling — for example a view called Repurpose For Social that only shows articles already published more than two months ago. I tried making this date filter by using the formula field TODAY minus Published Date greater than 60 but Airtable’s formula syntax is weird so I had to google the correct one. Hint for beginners: dates in Airtable are basically treated like numbers in some formulas but strings in others. This was one of those little gotcha moments where I thought nothing was wrong but my automation to send old posts to Buffer just stopped firing.
Sending Airtable Data To Other Tools
For me the whole point of this pipeline wasn’t just tracking stuff in Airtable — it was automatically pushing content into other places like social media schedulers and CMS drafts. My first attempt was through Zapier but somewhere in the middle of testing one of my Zaps kept triggering twice for the same record. This is the kind of bug that feels like Airtable is gaslighting you. In reality the trigger was “new or updated record” which means if you even scroll and tweak a comma in the record, the Zap runs again. I learned to use filtered steps in Zapier to only allow the run if Status = Ready To Repurpose and a separate checkbox called SendToZap = checked. This at least stopped the accidental resending problem. Pro tip if you are new — keep a field in Airtable just for marking something as done so you can block automations from looping.
Using Linked Records To Avoid Duplication
One disaster I ran into: I was copying the same text into multiple fields because I needed short excerpts for social media and slightly longer ones for email. Then two weeks later I wanted to update a typo in all of them and instantly regretted the duplication. The fix was to have one master record for each piece of content and then link it to repurposed versions in another table. In Airtable, a linked record is like a relationship in a database — but don’t let that word scare you if you’ve never done database stuff. It just means one record points to another. Once I set it up, any repurposed social post linked to its original article, and I could pull its content with a lookup field. Now I change the title once and every connected version updates automatically 🙂 This is also when my table got messy because Airtable shows linked records in these chunky pill shapes that don’t sort nicely.
Color Coding And Grouping To Stay Sane
When your pipeline has dozens of records it becomes a visual nightmare. I color coded the Status field so Draft is yellow, Ready To Edit is blue, and Published is green. Then I grouped the view by Status so Airtable lumps like things together. This sounds tiny but when you’re repurposing the same post for blog email and LinkedIn, seeing all the green grouped stuff together is much less stressful than hunting for them in one endless list. At one point I accidentally color coded by the wrong field (Topic instead of Status) and all my early stages looked finished when they weren’t. If you are new, remember that color coding does not change what records are shown — it’s literally just a visual hint.
Keeping Old Content From Disappearing
The weird thing about content repurposing is you want to hide everything that’s irrelevant right now but not lose it. My first filter just hid everything in Published more than 90 days old. The problem — I forgot that Airtable filters are per view, so when I cloned a view for Social Media Repurpose, that old filter got cloned too. Result: the automation that should have posted a throwback piece to Twitter never saw the record because the view was literally hiding it. The trick that I landed on was to never delete anything and instead have a view called Archive with all the deep old stuff visible. Then if a record goes missing from any active view and I suspect my filters ate it, I can check Archive and bring it back.
Combining Airtable Automations With Views
Airtable itself now has built in automations and this is where the pipeline gets fun or chaotic depending on the day. For example I set up an automation that runs when a record enters the Ready To Repurpose view. The action sends the record details to Slack so I don’t forget to write the variations for Instagram. This works perfectly until you realize Airtable sees “enters the view” as any change that now passes the filter criteria. So if you edit something old and it accidentally qualifies, the automation fires again. One day I got 12 Slack pings in a row because I bulk updated unrelated records but they all fit the filter. Now I add an extra checkbox in the view filter called AutomationReady so I have to deliberately check it before it triggers.
Testing The Whole Flow Before Relying On It
The last lesson in setting up this repurposing system was learning to run dry tests before connecting the final publishing step. I literally made a table called Sandbox and copied a few dummy records into it to see how they moved from Idea Intake to Published and then into the repurpose views. Airtable sometimes reacts slower than you think so a Zap or automation might not see a new record until a couple of minutes later. When I first ran it live, my CMS got two empty drafts because Airtable had not yet registered that the lookup field with the excerpt had filled in. If you’re new, just know that you can fake each stage manually first before letting it run unsupervised. It saves you from waking up to 15 half posted Tweets with missing URLs 😛