IFTTT - Automate Your Social Media Marketing Tasks

It's tough to keep up with all of the marketing tools available to us today, but this week I came across one I had to share. As marketers we are often tasked with more items than we can fit in a day and those tasks often include social media marketing. I'm often sent emails to review new services, but it is very rare for me to experience one that I feel the need to write about right away. IFTTT is a social media software application that got not only attention, but an urgency to share.

IFTTT stands for "if this then that."

Confused yet? Don't be. IFTTT let's you create triggers or "recipes" as they call them. These recipes allow you to define tasks that when something is triggered that you have identified in you recipe it will prompt another action.

For ease of understanding I will borrow their terminology. You setup an IFTTT recipe. In your recipe you have two ingredients:

• A Trigger
• A Response Action

You can also select ingredients to your recipe. Ingredient represent data that will prompt the trigger. Your ingredient could be an email subject line, attachment, or sender's email address.

A shared recipe that I think clearly shows the use of IFTTT is the ability to create share every Instagram photo to your Facebook wall. If you use both of these tools in your social media marketing think of the benefits.

For example - If I'm an interior decorator and one of the ways I market my business is to share my latest projects using photos through Instagram, I just created a trigger that every Instagram photo I take will be shared to my business Facebook wall.

I could also do the same thing by creating a recipe that shares every Instagram photo to my blog. No more fumbling with the share button, it's all taken care of.

You create recipes on IFTTT by using building blocks. Those building blocks can include but are not limited to the following:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Evernote
• Instagram
• Weather Forecast
• Email

Do you see how endless recipes could be created to save you time?

I know this can see confusing until you use it so let me share with you another example. If I am a Plumber I could set the following:

If it is going to be below freezing tomorrow post specific "How to Protect Your Pipes" blog post to my business Facebook wall.

Now are you seeing the value? It takes a little while to get the hang of creating recipes so thankfully there are public shared IFTTT recipes that can you help you get started. A few of my favorite recipes include:

• Send an tweet to Twitter when a new blog post is published.
• Save Instagram photos to Dropbox.
• Share starred Google Reader items to Buffer to share on social media networks later.
• Save my email attachments to Dropbox if they are from a specific sender.

By now you should have the point and more than likely are as excited about IFTTT as I am. Share with me your recipes, I'm anxious to see how you will be using IFTTT.