Streamline sharing trail conditions to Facebook with Trailbot

Facebook is undeniably the most popular platform for sharing official mountain bike trail conditions. While other web sites may have more crowdsourced data, trail managers favor Facebook for its ease of posting, instant feedback loop via likes and shares, and long-standing communities.

While we'd like to see less reliance on social media for a litany of reasons, this is still the main touchpoint many trail managers have with their rider communities. To support this Trailbot offers features for streamlining posting trail conditions to Facebook. Our top design goal is to allow trail managers to "Post once, publish everywhere that's technically possible" so that you can spend your limited time on other valuable tasks.

4 ways to share your updates to Facebook

Single Post to Page

The most popular option is to share the most recent update for a trail system to one or more Facebook pages:

An image version of the update is automatically included since posts with pictures get better engagement. Any pictures uploaded to Trailbot are also automatically included.

Summary Post to Page

If you have multiple trail systems, creating a Facebook post for each individual update can be time consuming and may also harm your chances of the algorithm showing someone the 'right' update. Summary posts to the rescue! Summary posts combine updates from multiple trail systems into a single update:

Update your conditions in Trailbot, share a summary post and boom you're done with social media for the day!

Page Profile Picture

Some trail systems like to update their Facebook profile picture with an overlay of current open/closed status. Trailbot can streamline this for you, saving you the effort of editing/managing images.

Page Cover Image

If your Facebook represents multiple trail systems, you can also dynamically update your Facebook cover image with a graphic showing the current open/closed status for your trail systems. No more tedious image editing.

Facebook Groups

Facebook does not offer an API (what Trailbot uses to communicate with Facebook) for automating posts to Groups. We recommend creating an official Facebook Page, posting to that page, then sharing that post to a group(s).

The Trailbot mobile app also supports sharing a text-only or image version of updates via your device's built-in sharing system, which offers options to share to Facebook groups if you have the Facebook app installed.

Other Considerations

Facebook requires app developers to require their users to individually authenticate with Facebook. This means that each trail manager within Trailbot will need to connect their individual Facebook account, granting access to the Facebook Pages they have access to.

You can limit the pages Trailbot has access to during the authentication process. For a Trailbot user to be able to post to a Facebook Page, they need to have the correct permissions posting set in Facebook. Essentially, if they can post to the page via Facebook, they'll be able to connect it to Trailbot.

We do not recommend sharing Facebook accounts/passwords between people. Shared credentials can make it difficult to see who has posted, can triggger Facebook fraud alerts and get complicated when someone leaves your organization. Both Facebook and Trailbot provide the features necessary to limit access to just the people who need it.

Ready to save time posting to Facebook?

If you're a trail manager, add your trail system(s) to Trailbot to start saving time today!

Questions? Reach out any time.