Save time in managing your business’ social media accounts

Posted by Joshua Nutt on 12th September 2016

Tags Social Media

We’re often bombarded with apps that proclaim to make us more productive and streamline our social media activity. This frequently turns out not to be the case, and said apps tend to become more useless than useful.

I think IFTTT goes against this trend. And can save you loads of time managing your social media accounts.

First off, IFTTT stands for ‘If This, Then That’. And it does just that. IFTTT connects as many different social media accounts as you like and then acts as a trigger to make things happen automatically across them – In other words, you can set it up so that ‘If you do X’ it automatically makes other connected accounts ‘do Y’.

It’s as simple as that. And there’s a huge amount of ‘recipes’ (as they call them) that you can apply to make use of this tool. For example you can set it up so that:

  • If you post photos on Instagram, it will share them automatically on Twitter too. Something that Twitter disabled long ago, but now this is an easy fix.
  • If you post a message on Twitter with a specific hashtag, it will post that message automatically on Facebook too.
  • Build a twitter list of users tweeting about a specific hashtag. Incredibly useful for businesses wanting to target a certain demographic.
  • If you post images on Instagram, it will also pin them to a Pinterest board too. A small time saver and keeps all your Instagram photos on Pinterest.
  • If you publish a blog on either Wordpress or Blogger it will automatically share it via your social media accounts. Again, another time saver that can post to multiple social media accounts in seconds.
  • You can even connect it to your phone’s weather app and tell it that if rain is forecast in the morning, it will send you a notification reminding you not to leave home without your coat or umbrella!

IFTTT has thousands of different standard recipes which are all designed to make your life a little easier. And if you can’t quite find what you’re looking for, there’s an option to create your own.

In a world where your business is expected to be on so many social media accounts, it’s great to finally have an automated app ready and waiting to ‘do this’ on one if we ‘do that’ on another.

IFTTT is free to download on both Apple and Android. Platforms that are already compatible include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Fitbit, Reddit, New York Times, Google Calendar, Messages, Spotify and many more.