There is a great web application out there that can help you automate all of the little annoying things that you have to do in your day to day computing life. The service is called IFTTT (stands for “IF This Then That”) that has partnerships with several different online and mobile software companies to make your life easier. We want to show you how to use this service to tweet your blog article automatically right after you post it.
Using IFTTT
The process for signing up is the same as with any other web app service. Give them an email and password and you are all set to go. From their it can be a little overwhelming. Here are a couple of guidelines:
- The Tinkerer
If you are someone that loves to play around with programming or the backside of devices, then I would encourage you to go check out the “Create Your Own Recipe” section. If you need inspiration, you can browse through others, but do not let what others have done limit what you want/can do. - The Practical Man
For those that simply want a great solution for lots of little things in their lives, I would highly recommend visiting the Browsing section of all the recipes that people have created and that you can quickly and easily customize. I’d recommend using the drop down box on that list with “What’s Hot” and “Popular” to see what many people think are helpful to their daily lives. - Mobile Users
What started off as an easy desktop experience is now a full fledged mobile service too and separate from the first two categories of people, if you use your mobile device more than 20 minutes a day, their is probably some repetitive action you could eliminate from your everyday tasks.
IFTTT and Tweeting Blogs
If you are an intermediate or advanced WordPress blogger, you most assuredly have used the ‘tweet my new blog post’ plugins to automatically take care of distributing your content. The problem with plugins is that it uses your web server CPU, database access, and potentially conflicts with other plugins and therefore bringing down your website completely. Replacing that plugin with IFTTT will eliminate all of those issues instantly as your website does not perform any of the actions.
The RSS to Tweet recipe is what you will want to use. After activating it, go to the recipe and insert your specific RSS feed as well as how you want your new post tweet to look. The process is super easy, but you need to make sure you send out the right blog article to work correctly. When its setup, you are instantly ready to write great content and not have to work fiddle with it again.
What are your favorite IFTTT recipes?
Jason Wiser says
Great simple wrapup of one of my favorite tools. Thanks Jeremy.
seventy8Productions says
Jason, how do you use it? Any favorite recipes I can steal?
Jason Wiser says
I just saw this. Sorry man. Ok I know this is not a popular strategy for everyone, but there are any small business that this works for and that is autoposting from FB Page to Twitter. I used to like TwitterFeed, but it kept breaking, so now I use IFTTT and it works great every time. But the old way was to post to blog, IFTTT to FB Page, then Twitter Feed to Twitter and LinkedIn.
Now LinkedIn has shut us out, and it is better to go straight from Blog To twitter. This can get pretty ugly if you start seeing multiple posts on the networks from auto shares, and you lose the organic feel, so I do not recommend this to everyone and certainly not without thoughtful consideration.
seventy8Productions says
Agreed. I try to automate as little as possible and if I do, i specifically write a social media post intentionally to be relational and make it feel more organic. (How many buzzwords is that?)