Automatic New Product Posting to Social Media

Implementing Automatic Posting of New Products to Social Media

When manager publishes product in catalog, system automatically distributes announcement to required channels: VKontakte, Telegram channel, Facebook Page, Odnoklassniki. Without manual copying, without delays, with correct formatting for each platform.

Architecture

Core — event-driven pipeline. Product publication generates ProductPublished event, which is picked up by separate listeners for each social network. Each listener queues task, worker processes independently.

ProductPublished event
    ├── VkPostListener → queue: vk-posts
    ├── TelegramPostListener → queue: telegram-posts
    ├── FacebookPostListener → queue: facebook-posts
    └── OdnoklassnikiPostListener → queue: ok-posts

Such scheme guarantees that failure in one network doesn't block posting to others.

VKontakte

Uses VK API v5.199. For publishing from community need community token with wall right. Photo upload — two-step: first get upload URL, then upload file and save.

// Step 1: get upload server
$uploadServer = $vk->photos->getWallUploadServer(['group_id' => $groupId]);

// Step 2: upload image
$uploaded = Http::attach('photo', file_get_contents($imageUrl), 'photo.jpg')
    ->post($uploadServer['upload_url']);

// Step 3: save photo
$saved = $vk->photos->saveWallPhoto([
    'group_id' => $groupId,
    'photo'    => $uploaded['photo'],
    'server'   => $uploaded['server'],
    'hash'     => $uploaded['hash'],
]);

// Step 4: publish post
$vk->wall->post([
    'owner_id'    => -$groupId,
    'message'     => $caption,
    'attachments' => "photo{$saved[0]['owner_id']}_{$saved[0]['id']}",
]);

Telegram

Telegram Bot API — simplest for integration. Method sendPhoto or sendMediaGroup for multiple photos. Caption supports HTML and MarkdownV2.

import httpx

async def post_to_telegram(bot_token: str, channel_id: str, photo_url: str, caption: str):
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        resp = await client.post(
            f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{bot_token}/sendPhoto",
            json={
                "chat_id": channel_id,
                "photo": photo_url,
                "caption": caption,
                "parse_mode": "HTML",
            },
            timeout=15,
        )
        resp.raise_for_status()
        return resp.json()

Caption limit — 1024 characters. If description longer, sent as additional message via sendMessage with reply_to_message_id.

Facebook Page

Graph API v19.0, method /{page-id}/photos. Requires Page Access Token with pages_manage_posts right.

POST /v19.0/{page-id}/photos
  ?url=https://cdn.example.com/img.jpg
  &message=New product in catalog...
  &published=true

Text Templates

Different platforms require different formatting. Templates stored in database and editable via CMS:

Template variables: {name}, {price}, {url}, {description}, {tags}.

Retry Logic and Monitoring

Each queue task has 3 attempts with exponential backoff (1 min → 5 min → 15 min). After exhausting attempts — entry in failed_social_posts table with error body and admin notification. Post metrics (success/fail per platform) displayed in dashboard.

Implementation Timeline

Integration of two platforms (VK + Telegram) — 4–6 business days. Each additional platform — 1–2 days. Admin panel with post history and templates — additional 2–3 days.