Automate the social activity of your Internet startup using ifttt.com

Let's start with the description ifttt.com

ifttt.com is a very promising startup, which in a nutshell: Lets You Hack Together Web Apps, Without Coding Skills . If more detailed, then this is a service that allows users, without immersing in the API a huge number of services and any knowledge of development \ programming languages, to mix and automate various activities with each other. In early 2012, we received a seed investment of $ 1.5M .

There are only a few entities in the system, such as tasks (these are the rules of your triggers or reactions to an external event), recipes (these are tasks that others have created and shared with everyone) and channels (this is what you can try to mix with by setting up different execution patterns tasks, each channel should be tied to ifttt.com).
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The task screen looks like this

Preamble: what goals should be pursued?

I think no one needs to explain the reasons for which the social presence and the main thing is adequate social activity, this is the most important attribute for any product (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a start-up, an e-shop, or a site about insect rights). Through social networks, most often, we get:

• Channel of attracting leads / early supporters ( early adopters )
• Good feedback from real people.
• Advertising and PR among potential users and / or customers, as well as among media and bloggers
• Chance of virality

But what interests us is not so much why, but how much to do it, and even automatically, and to set it up, but it worked reliably. This is what this article is about.

Well, what to automate?

Let us stop and think, and what social activity can we automate? What kind of social activity is usually taken to achieve the goals announced above? In addition to generating content that is not automated in fact, the rest can be automated almost everything!

So, a list of what is accepted, what is useful and what one could try to do in social networks to achieve their worthy goals:

• Spread news about your product to the maximum number of social channels (WP blog, twitter, facebook (personal or page), tumblr, delicious, linkedin, etc.) from one source (for example a blog, although you can absolutely from any)
• Repost \ retweet from your personal accounts any posts \ tweets made from official accounts of your products
• Repost \ retweet from your product accounts news on your industry with selected resources
• Twitter: Thanks to new followers, those who retweet you or people mentioning your account or any word you specify by auto reply or mention, post sample tweets with any frequency, mutual following and infinitely many etc.
• Publish any documents (presentations, descriptions, studies) in all social networks you need just by putting the file in public dropbox or sending it by email
• Receive any statuses or answers in the form of sms for free

and much more, what is enough imagination when using ifttt.com


Ifttt channel list screenshot

Practical cases of using ifttt.com

In addition to an infinite number of personal goals, a la get sms warning that tomorrow it will rain, we will consider three practical cases.

We broadcast news to all social networks

Baseline conditions

• Personally, I think that it is optimal to spread information from a blog about your product, with traffic landing either on the blog or on the website of your product.
• Let our blog be on WordPress and that’s where we post the original post.
• Do you have a facebook page and / or a personal account (or a fictional character), twitter account, linkedin, tumblr or another social service from the list

So, the scheme is simple:

1. Create an account on ifttt.com
2. Create ifttt tasks (or copy the following recipes)
3. WP -> Facebook page post ( recipe )
4. WP -> Facebook personal post ( recipe )
5. WP -> Twitter tweet ( recipe )
6. WP -> Linkedin status ( recipe )
7. WP -> Tumblr status ( recipe )
8. The task is done, now as soon as we have written something to the blog, information about it has spread to all the places we need.

The trivial task tell you? And I agree with you, there are a lot of native and third-party services that do something like this, if the clever schemes with information transfer ala WP -> RSS -> Twitter tweet -> Facebook personal post -> Linkedin status and this also works, but far less manageable and not always good looking. I find the broadcast using ifttt the most controlled and most importantly the most finely tuned.

Some screenshots:


a) Create a task

b) Select the trigger on which the task should work

c) Select the action you want from ifttt

We automate Twitter activity

Baseline conditions

• We have twitter account of product for people.
• We have a twitter bot account of the product for all kinds of automatic actions.
• Do you have your twitter account

Scheme for twitter

twitter account product

• We thank each new follower by tweeting with his mention with an arbitrary text.
• We monitor the product hashtag (if of course it is) and if someone mentions it, we receive a notification in any convenient way (sms, email, etc.)
• reciprocal following is not fully automated, apparently for anti-spam reasons, but you can easily add to twitter the https://twitter.com/#!/%username%/lists list and then just as easily add it with your hands, or use more advanced options
• Post someone else's favorite tweets on the facebook page of your product by adding a tweet to favorites

twitter bot account product

at any mention of your product name, website address or other keyword throughout the tweeter, do an auto answer to the user with predefined text. ( recipe )

your twitter account

You configure retweet of all posts from your product account, because you are doing it all the time , only manually.

Otherwise it will not work

There is something that it is almost impossible to automate without writing your code in any other way, and it is almost impossible to find a ready-made solution, consider such cases.

Initial conditions

• You have your product's facebook page, product twitter account, google + page, personal dropbox
• You know the sources of news and posts in the industry of your product.
• You regularly upload pictures, presentations and other documents for public access.

RSS -> Facebook or Twitter

You can always set a fairly accurate keyword in the rss feed feed and in case a new article matches it, automatically post it on facebook or twitter ( recipe )

Dropbox -> Facebook or Twitter

We set up a separate folder in the dropbox for the task, that if a new file gets there, make a post on the facebook page using a template. Conveniently if you post different pictures or presentations. The same can be done with a tweeter. ( Facebook recipe ) ( Twitter recipe )

Google+ -> Facebook Exotic

Configuring broadcast from Google+ to facebook

Minuses

Some of the examples given can be fully automated without hesitation, but something can create stupid situations, like retweets of bad reviews or off-topic news, but that's another story and I am sure that the creators of ifttt.com think how to most effectively resolve such conflicts.

Want to check it out? just mention the word habrifttt in any of your tweets and get personalized automatic thanks from me!

PS I recommend the recipe - as soon as a major earthquake happens in the world - send me an sms.
PSS Hint: To activate the SMS channel, enter 007 instead of the usual +7