Boost Your Social Media with IFTTT

When used right social media can be a great tool for improving your SEO, but it requires a lot of dedication, and there are lots of small tasks that are repetitive and time consuming. If this, then that (IFTTT for short) is a service that allows users to create combinations between different services and devices to automate everyday tasks.

The service recently got a major update, including and image change, simplifying some existing features and introducing new ones.

How to use IFTTT

IFTTT system is very simple, here’s what you can do:

• Add your channels: Channels are the different services that IFTTT supports: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote… You would need to sync your accounts from different services to create combinations between them.
• Create or use other people’s shared recipes: Recipes are tasks that users define following this pattern: “If this [thing happens on one service], then that [should be done on another service]“, the “this” part would be called a trigger and the “that” one an action, and those are the ingredients for your recipe.

  You can create your own recipes or use recipes created and shared by other people. You can also modify other people’s recipes to meet your needs.

• Share your recipes.
• Modify and turn recipes on/off: Recipes check for new Trigger data every 15 minutes. Some recipes have “Quick Triggers” that will run as soon as they receive Trigger data.

IFTTT Limitations

IFTTT is a great tool, but it lacks some important features for the heavy social media users.

• No multi-account management: You can only sync one account to each channel. In case you want to create recipes for let’s say different Facebook accounts, you would have to create a different IFTTT account for each one of them.
• Limited channels: Right now, the list of channel is limited to 50, which may seem a lot, but some important ones (Google+, for instance) are missing.
• Limited tracking: You can see how many times and when a recipe was triggered, but not much more.

IFTTT is not a professionally oriented marketing tool, but it has a great potential and works great for automating repetitive everyday tasks, allowing users to concentrate on more important activities. And, with a little imagination, you could create a lot of interesting recipes for a wide range of purposes.