How to Use Pocket and Zapier to Boost Your Productivity

How to Use Pocket and Zapier to Boost Your Productivity

Pocket is how you connect with the content you care about, whether it’s staying on top of in-depth industry analysis, saving longreads for the weekend, or collecting articles by your favorite writer. It’s not unusual that an item you save leads to follow up steps—you email it to a friend, post it to Facebook or share it in your team chat app. With these extra steps in mind, I’m excited to introduce to you Zapier, an app automation tool that recently released its Pocket integration.

You can use Pocket and Zapier together to automatically create Trello cards for new favorited items, post a message in Slack for new tagged items or append to an Evernote note for new archived items. Zapier integrates with over 450 business apps, meaning you can amp up your productivity when it comes to using Pocket for team collaboration, task management, social media management and more.

Here are five ways the Pocket community is using Zapier.

1. Team Collaboration

René de Vries, the co-founder and CTO of content marketing company HowardsHome, relies on Pocket to gather articles relevant to his industry. He then uses Zapier to connect Pocket to WordPress, the platform where his team will see the article.

“We’re taking selected Pocket items—based on either a tag or a favorite—and posting these to an internal WordPress blog,” says Vries. “This is so that employees that are not quite as active on social media, still get to see interesting articles. It’s how we plan to build an internal knowledge repository with interesting stuff.”

Zapier user Harrison Thomas has a similar knowledge sharing process in place, but one that involves Trello.

“We, like many others, realized that sharing links to relevant news sites via emails were both distracting and rarely read,” says Thomas. “Instead, I set up a Zapier integration to send any Pocket articles that I tagged with our company’s title to Trello into our ‘Marketplace News & Info’ board.”

To use an integration like Vries or Thomas, just click “Use this Zap.”

To connect Pocket with another team collaboration tool you use, either implement one of the Zapier integrations below or pick from one of over 400 apps when using the integration tool.

2. Project / Task Management

TheSMARTsub, makers of substitute teacher management software, made Pocket an integral part of it sales team by connecting it to Trello. The smart use case: they want to be sure to follow up when existing or potential clients are mentioned in the media.

“Google Alerts provides us certain content that we ​will want to follow up with a handwritten congratulations note or a solution we provide that prospects are not aware of,” says Kevin Koziol, the company’s founder and CEO. “​Placing that article in Pocket and feeding it to a Trello to-do card keeps our pipeline full of fresh leads and the time savings recognized by the Pocket-Trello Zapier integration allows us to stay focused on sales.”

Moreover, when Koziol set up this Zapier integration, he configured it to add due dates to each Trello cards. An automation, he says, that keeps him on task.

3. Reading Log and Notes

To use an integration like Vries or Thomas, just click “Use this Zap.” Jacob Sam-La Rose, a writer, educator and independent producer in the arts, is a voracious reader.

“A lot of my reading is stimulus for writing, or research for projects I’m working on. As such, I’m particularly invested in information—and inspiration—management,” Sam-La Rose says.

By connecting Pocket to Evernote via Zapier, he’s able to not only better track and quantify his reading, but review and learn from it a second time, too.

“The workflow essentially offers me an automated reading log that’s really helpful for reviewing and thus retaining more of what I’ve read,” he says. “[It also] creates an individual note per logged item, which means I can write up whatever I remember of what I’ve read, or any questions or action points that might come to mind.”

His process involves one more trick, too: if he’s reviewing something in Evernote that he wants to be sure to return to later, he sets a reminder in the app.

4. Social Media Management

Mark Bailey, marketing coordinator for The Bailey Group, has found social media management bliss with Pocket, Buffer and Zapier.

“A huge pain point for me was getting visuals into the things we were sharing on Buffer,” says Bailey, who had tried other Pocket-Buffer integrations in the past. “Now, with this new Pocket integration, it automatically looks for those visuals and cuts out one to two minutes per post I share. Zapier is saving me at least 30 minutes a week.”

Bailey’s process involves tagging posts in Pocket with either “Twitter” or “Facebook.” When he does that, Zapier adds that article to his Buffer queue following a format he’s preconfigured in Zapier. Finally, Buffer shares the item on Twitter or Facebook.

“Our links look really good when we share them,” Bailey says, “they’re engaging, it’s no longer a text post.”

Vries of HowardsHome uses Pocket for social media management, too. He does so by making Trello the control center for his team of writers.

“Links from Pocket are imported into Trello, and are used as a basis for new content,” he says. “These Trello cards are used by writers, who add content, merge multiple cards to write a Tweet or a Facebook or LinkedIn post. In fact, we use a Trello to Buffer Zapier integration to do the actual publishing. All that’s required, is that a writer, once done writing, moves a Trello card to a Trello list named ‘Publish to Twitter’ and the Zapier integration does the rest.” With Zapier, you’re also be able to share new favorited or tagged items on Facebook.

Do More with Pocket

Zapier lets you make Pocket a bigger part of your workday, boosting your productivity along the way. Once you’ve explored how Zapier can help you get more out of Pocket, be sure to check out Pocket Premium, which unlocks even more powerful features that will further enhance your productivity.

Danny Schreiber is the lead marketer at Zapier, a tool that gives you internet superpowers by letting you integrate and automate hundreds of web apps. Previously, he wrote about the Midwest startup community as the founding editor of Silicon Prairie News. Find him on Twitter: @dannyaway