How Can IFTTT Add Some Lift to Your Marketing Efforts?
By Flying Hippo
Man, the future was going to be cool. What happened? Where’s my jetpack? Where’s my army of robots to help with doing the dishes?
While our platoon of robotic helpers may still be a few (dozen) years away, IFTTT (pronounced like “lift” without the “l”) is here to fill in at least some of the gaps.
If you’re unfamiliar, IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a service that allows people to connect various web platforms and social media networks together using easy conditional statements called “recipes.” All of the “recipes” fit the format of “If ___, then ___.” For us marketing types, IFTTT can be a huge time-saver.
Keeping up with every social media outlet can be a pain, so automating the process of posting just makes sense. Here’s a few ways marketers can make IFTTT work for them.
Social Media
Let’s say you wanted every Instagram photo you posted to be emailed to your sister, your mom and your cousin. Once you find the right recipe, all you have to do is connect your Instagram account, your email account, and pop in the email addresses of your recipients. And if you ever want to stop the automatic emails, just flip a switch. It’s remarkably easy to set up, and saves a bunch of time.
Or if you want your home’s thermostat to bump up a few degrees once the sun goes down, there’s a recipe for that, too.
While your thermostat won’t be very effective in marketing, there are plenty of recipes that make sense for social media and inbound marketers:
• Post Instagram photos as native Twitter pics
• If you post on Facebook, then Tweet automatically
• A new WordPress post will trigger a Facebook post
• Integrate your Twitter posts with Google Calendar
• Put your Facebook posts on Google+
There are thousands of other ways to streamline your social media with IFTTT, depending on what your needs are.
Keeping up with followers
You’ve built up a great brand, but keeping up with your followers can be a time-suck. IFTTT can help!
• Put all your new Twitter followers in a Google Spreadsheet
• DM a welcome message to your new Twitter followers
Social listening
Keep close tabs on your audience with some easy recipes:
• Auto-generate Follow Friday (#ff) Tweets for everyone you’ve favorited this week
• Wish your friends happy birthday automatically
… But Stay Human
With all of the automatic benefits of IFTTT, don’t automate everything. You can’t automate personality, and your followers will pick up on abnormalities. Your brand is not a robot, and it shouldn’t be.
Using IFTTT is a way to keep up with social media, and save some time. But it’s not something to overdo. There’s no cruise control for smart marketing.
