How To Use IFTTT To Your Advantage For Social Media

IFTTT is a powerful tool that your business should be using in your online marketing strategy. In case you haven’t heard of it before, IFTTT stands for ‘If This, Then That’ and is an online tool that allows you to set up ‘interactions’ between your different social media accounts and other web apps. There’s now also an app that allows you to get your phone involved and this introduces a whole slew of other features.

To use IFTTT, users must create ‘recipes’. This involves choosing a social media account or online service to be the trigger and then setting another to be involved in the action. An example of this would be to set a recipe so that every time someone tags you on Facebook, that picture gets automatically downloaded into your DropBox.

In ‘IFTTT’ format, this might look like the following:

IF [user tags me in a Facebook photo] THEN [download photo to Dropbox]

At first this might seem like a relatively simple setup, but as any programmer knows, these simple phrases can in fact be incredibly powerful when combined in the right ways. This makes IFTTT a formidable force to be reckoned with, and especially for webmasters and business owners.

Let’s look at some of the best uses if you fall into either of those categories.

The Top Uses of IFTTT for Business Owners and Webmasters

Populating Your Blog or Social Media Account

IFTTT can be used to make populating your blog or social media account much easier. For instance, you can set up recipes that post new photos to your blog, that Tweet or share to Reddit for you whenever you make a new blog post, that automatically check you in at various locations (like the gym for a fitness site) and or that Tweet YouTube videos you’ve liked on YouTube.

Setting To Do Lists and Reminders

Now that IFTTT has an Android app, you can get create recipes based on your location. This is brilliant, because it means you can messages to occur as and when you need them. For instance, you could get IFTTT to text you when you get into work to remind you of a job you have to do (great for when you remember things while falling asleep).

You could even get a text of your updated to-do list from note-taking app every day. Similarly, you could set reminders and to-do lists for when you re-enter your home, when you visit clients and more.

Reputation Management

Amazingly, you can even get notifications by text or e-mail whenever your business name gets mentioned or tagged on various forms of social media. That way you can always be there to defend your business or to thank your customers and clients for their loyalty.

Workflow Management

All the above can save a busy business owner a lot of time, but there are many more time management tricks available through IFTTT. For instance, if you want to avoid having to listen to voicemail at work, then you can set up a recipe to tell callers you’ll get back to them at a later date. Meanwhile you can get your calls taken and made added to a spreadsheet, or you can get your profile pictures to sync up across devices.

There are countless more amazing uses for IFTTT, so get on there and see what you can come up with. For more inspiration, try this list of great IFTTT recipes.