If you are in the marketing business you should be taking advantage of automation. Today we’re talking about the business tool automation that comes from IFTTT. It stands for If This Then That, and it’s a powerful toolset designed to capture information and communicate it through many different platforms.
The platform works with recipes as a way to define exactly where the content comes from, where it goes and what happens when it gets there. To work with IFTTT you’ll select a platform of choice, say Instagram. You’ll then select a destination, say Dropbox. The end result is a combination of activities that can happen based on your very specific specifications. In this case your Instagram photos can be saved to Dropbox.
For my passion project Dudeletseat I’ve set up IFTTT so that when I post a picture to Instagram that it automatically gets posted to my Twitter account, my Facebook Page account and Pinterest account. I’ll use Instagram’s native interface to post directly to my personal Facebook page.
There are some substantial implications for marketers, especially if you work on social media, or if you are an entrepreneur working to maximize your time and your reach.
You can use IFTTT to sync your email attachments to your Google Drive account. This is fantastic as a repository of your latest downloads.
Sync all your Google or iOS contacts to an Excel document. Use this feature to capture an email list to be used for upload into your Mailchimp email account.
Automatically capture usernames in a list when they tweet from a particular area. This is powerful if you are a store or a location based business. You can capture a list of people in your area and tweet at them, identify the influencers in your area and activate those influencers with marketing initiatives, like an invite to a restaurant. I turned on this recipe for about five minutes and got 20 people in my list. Of those people one is a YouTube with 30k followers, another person has 8k followers and another has 13k. These are all local people who I’m sure would be willing to come to a client’s restaurant and have a meal in exchange for some influencer coverage on their social media account.
If you want to generate new content connect your social media accounts to your WordPress site. This is especially valuable if your focus is driving traffic. Use IFTTT to generate a single new page post for every new piece of content you generate on Facebook.
You can use a similar functionality to capture a list of people who tweet using specific hashtags. You can use this to see who talks about niche terms in your business like. For us we cover #programmatic.
Another valuable tool that I tested recently is this email address extractor:Â The Extractor. If you find that you have challenges capturing email address you may take a look at this tool. Simply add the Chrome extension, login to your email account, and capture the email addresses in your account into an Excel document. Then, upload into MailChimp, add to your Facebook Advertising Custom Audiences, and extend your People Based Marketing reach.
