You never know where particular pain points may arise and how automation may alleviate them. Recently there was a client who maintained a content aggregation website. They had a problem with resource being skipped and there was a lot of duplication of effort because a lot of their resources came from Facebook.
We eventually helped them develop a solution where we would:
- Pull in Facebook imports via the Meta Graph API
- Parse out symbols in the message to determine how it should be categorized
- Import the resource into their database
- Update messages in the Facebook post to indicate to staff it was imported
- Create Trello cards in the event of an issue.
We used long lasting tokens and set up a scheduled task to refresh the token periodically and then set the importer to run twice a day. The client was happy that they were able to manage a lot of their input directly from their Facebook page and even spot-check to make sure that data was imported.
A link to the project stripped of proprietary business logic can be found on github.