I was recently pointed to the web tool If This Then That (ifttt) by my friend Theda Sandiford, and I’m simply amazed. Using ifttt, you can create “tasks” where one action triggers another action, usually involving online communications.
The best way to describe ifttt is to give you concrete examples. You could program the following:
“If I post a photo to Instagram using the tag #travel, trigger the action of posting that photo to my Facebook Page.”
“If I save a link to Delicious using the tag #social, trigger the action of posting that photo to my Facebook Page.”
Okay, those are actually two tasks I created:
I’m definitely not a fan of automating everything. If you’re going to participate and be part of the communities in your social channels, then by all means be present and interact. But to trigger a few ancillary postings from your social actions feels like acceptable flavor and color to me.
Here is the result from the first action above – a photo posted through Instagram appeared on my author fan page, particularly handy since you cannot yet post directly from Instagram to your company’s Facebook Page.
Some say that you should post directly and manually to Facebook for better rankings, but I’m one for mixing things up and not being so caught up in the numbers all the time.
You can create links and actions between a number of channels including the usual suspects like Twitter, Facebook profiles, Facebook Pages, and LinkedIn but also Dropbox, Evernote, YouTube, GTalk, email and even a phone call.
I can’t wait to figure out more uses for ifttt, and I promise to share them if they work well for me.
Are you using ifttt? If so, what are some tasks you’ve created?
Yes, I have heard about ifttt but now I am going to try it. Thanks.
ooooh.
i know the tags i want to show up on facebook business page vs what i wanna share on twitter. this is really good.
hadn’t heard of it. and am kinda doing this already but in my head.
for the simple nudge to have a bitta gameplan. i’m all things spontaneous but consistency is vital for me right now.
tx muchly:) hope you are closer to home….
Thanks for sharing, Aliza! ifttt looks really interesting. I’ve already signed up and started using it for some simple cross posts.
There is one thing I found troubling, though: default privacy settings.
I wanted to create a simple task to cross post from Twitter to Facebook (FB) whenever I used a certain hashtag. Easy enough to do…All I had to do was enable both Twitter and FB access. By default, ifttt wanted VERY broad access to my FB account. It wasn’t just permission to post on my behalf; ifttt by default also wanted permission to see what other people say to me, view my InBox, and manage my Pages. While this level of access might be needed for some actions I would want to take on ifttt, it was way too much for the purposes of what I wanted to accomplish.
By managing my per-application privacy settings in Facebook, it was possible to revoke some of these privileges for ifttt (though some are required for the app to work). However, most people would probably just enable the defaults and not even think about it.
Word to the wise: Be aware of default privacy settings and manage them in a way that’s consistent with your usage. Don’t give apps more access than they need!
Anyway, thanks again for the pointer. I’ll be digging into ifttt quite a bit more to see what it can do.