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As bloggers, we have a lot to manage. You may have an editorial calendar you’re constantly trying to keep up with, along with writing and editing your articles. Photos don’t take themselves, nor do they edit themselves. When your post is ready and scheduled, you have to consider how you’re going to get that post in front of your readers and new eyes. Scheduling social media posts can be so overwhelming when you have so many accounts.
Enter If This Then That (IFTTT) – a website that allows you to create “recipes” and feed your content to various social media platforms.
How To Get The Most Out Of IFTTT
I was a little late to the IFTTT game and only signed up last fall. A friend introduced it to me, and I was hooked. I can set up a recipe to feed photos from Instagram that have specific hashtags to my Facebook page or to Twitter (or any other place you may want it to appear).
I realize that not everyone who follows me on Facebook wants to see all of my Instagram photos, which is why I post selectively using hashtags. I also tend to forget to pin my own content, so IFTTT helps in those instances, and I notify my Twitter followers when I pin to my blog board on Pinterest – using IFTTT.
While I’m feeding all of my blog posts to my Facebook page and to Twitter, I’m more selective on how other social media is shared. IFTTT allows me to cover all my bases by setting up recipes that meet my needs.
- If I post an Instagram photo with a specific hashtag, it will be posted in an album on my Facebook page.
- I feed a specific hashtag from my account on Instagram to my Project 365 WordPress blog. You could also use IFTTT to post on Blogger or Tumblr.
- You can even create a recipe to pin blog posts published with specific categories or tags to a board on your Pinterest account.
Take a half hour to sign up for the site and spend time creating a few recipes. This won’t replace you interacting with your followers in real time on social media, but it can help get your posts seen on channels you’d normally not remember to use, and save you time during the day when you are sharing on the go.
Tip: Set up a recipe in IFTTT to share Instagram posts on Twitter with the picture in the tweet!
What are your favorite IFTTT recipes? Share them in the comments!
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First make sure your channels are connected. When you set up your account, you’re usually prompted to connect your social channels.
If you are using WordPress, start a new recipe. Your “if” would be WordPress. If you create a WordPress post, then something will happen. There is an option to select a category or tag, if you don’t want every single post to end up on Pinterest. Your “then” would be Pinterest. IFTTT will prompt you for the name of your Pinterest board. Type the board name you want everything to post to (I have a general blog board for my content.) If the board name doesn’t match up, IFTTT will create a board on your behalf.
So the recipe is If there’s a WordPress post, Then it will post to your board on Pinterest.
Other recipes I have include an Instagram hashtag (for a conference I attend annually) and those photos show up in an album on my Facebook page. And all of my Instagram posts go to Twitter (and this displays the photos on Twitter, versus just linking to Instagram.)
Hope that helps!!
Would love for you to share some of your recipes. IFTTT is a huge and overwhelming task if you’re new and don’t know how it works. You mentioned you use it to help you since you forget to pin your own content? What recipe did you create for that?
I just commented and it appeared above this one. 🙂 Hopefully you’ll see it!