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IF you haven’t THEN you should use IFTTT for social

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While some of you have been doing amazing things once and then allowing IFTTT work for you forever since December 14, 2010, this article is for the rest of you who are asking, “what’s IFTTT?” Well, first, it’s pronounced like gift without the G; secondly, it’s a material conditional binary operator… if this, then that.
IFTTT
What IFTTT means to you is that you can quickly and easily pop onto the IFTTT website or their Android and iOS apps and start automating social media actions based on actual physical behaviors.IFTTT Tweet White House Obama  It’s thrilling!  While I have yet to do these sorts of small, flirty, things yet, I could presumably tweet @bobfine every time I pass by UberOffices on my motorcycle. I did that with a pre-baked recipe to tweet president Obama whenever I am near the White House. IFTTT can connect to my Android (or your iPhone), keep track of my GPS, and then, when I reach a perimeter of my choosing, as tight or as loose as I want to the White House, then my Android will alert IFTTT and a tweet will be sent.

jeffPortenIFTTT can stalk your phone, your behavior on Twitter, Instagram, Bitly, Blogger, Buffer, Delicious, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Feedly, Fitbit, Flickr, Foursquare, your iOS or Android GPS location, LinkedIn, Pocket, Reddit, SoundCloud, Tumblr, Twitter, Withings, and even Yo (and so many more, I just cherry-picked). Then, you can make IFTTT do any number of cool things such as changing your profile picture on Twitter every time you change it on Facebook, automatically share all of your Instagram photos as Twitter-native images rather than just a link to Instagram, and all sorts of pre-packaged and pre-baked recipes you can go explore right now over on the Recipes to Streamline Your Social Media section of IFTTT — check it out but be sure to come back!

Some Useful Recipes You Can Use Right Now

IFTTTSocBut that’s only the beginning. Just remember four things:

  1. Be careful about creating infinite loops that will quickly garbage up your feeds and streams
  2. You can add more than one variation of the same recipe and that could really make a noise social media mess — audit your My Recipes tab after you’ve added a bunch just to make sure you haven’t doubled-tripled-quadrupled your automated tasks.
  3. Each pre-made recipe is only par baked — you can customize many of the above to your explicit needs
  4. If you don’t see what you need, please give IFTTT recipe-making on your own a try — it’s very easy and you can really hit the nail on the head of your own explicit needs if you take the time to follow three guided steps.

I hope I didn’t create a million monsters. Have fun playing but I really made a personal mess of things the first time I implemented IFTTT and needed to spend the next day auditing my work after enabling a bazillion recipes over the course of one day. I made a mess but I made an excusable mess that I quickly fixed — and I was able to easily do the audit via the handy suite of IFTTT Android apps — in this case, the IF by IFTTT app.

It’s OK to be a little messy. I try to make as many mistakes on your behalf before you do, but on social media as in real life, it’s better to be the life of the party instead of the wallflower, even if you end up being a bit of an arse sometimes. People forgive a little bit of the lout if you can generally remain the life of the party the rest of the time.

Any questions? Please pop them into comment. Otherwise, good luck and go git ’em, Tiger!

Go git 'em Tiger!

Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, digital strategist and technologist, is a leading expert in digital: search engine optimization (SEO), online relationship management (ORM), Internet privacy, Wikipedia curationsocial media strategy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreachinfluencer engagement, and Internet crisis response, with the digital PR and social media marketing agency Gerris digital. [Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call with me] A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and adviser to the industries' leading firms. Chris Abraham specializes in web technologies, including content marketing, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.  Chris Abraham was named a Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer by Forbes, #1 PR2.0 Influencer by Traackr, and top-10 social media influencers by Marketwire; and, for what it’s worth, Chris has a Klout of 79 the last time he looked. Chris Abraham started doing web development back in 1994, SEO in 1998, blogging in 1999, influencer engagement in 2003, social media strategy in 2005, blogger outreach in 2006, and Wikipedia curation in 2007. Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call. If you want to know the services that Chris offers check out Services If you want to work with Chris use the Contact Form You're welcome to follow me via Social Media You can learn more about Chris over in About Chris writes a lot so check out the Blog Chris offers webinars so check Events

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