6 Basic Ways to Simplify Twitter for Business with IFTTT - Rich Thinking

Twitter is very much on-demand. You need to be in the moment to be relevant. If you’re late even an hour, you may as well not have acted in the first place.

Most business owners I speak to have an issue with Twitter: “I don’t get it“, “People don’t use it (because I don’t)“, “Isn’t Twitter dead?“, “My customers probably aren’t on there“. You know, I used to do social media advocacy before the mainstream wave hit. I used to answer these questions with truth and honesty: “Yes, Twitter is relevant and here’s why you need to be on it“. Years later, it empowers me a little to see a car drive by with Twitter icons and usernames decals on it, or to see a TV anchor’s Twitter handle on the screen. That’s what happens when you’re a “No” first kind of person – buying stock last never produces winners.

What I’ve also experienced with business owners that do Twitter is that it’s way too overwhelming for them. Tweets are coming in left and right, nobody’s answering them, and they’re not sure how to get followers. Today I’ll address a few simple hacks that will help simplify your content and engagement on Twitter and hopefully get you jump started.

If you aren’t familiar with If-This-Than-That (IFTTT in short), it’s a free tools that, in the most simplest description, watches the internet for things to happen, and when something happens, it execute your desired request in the background. It’s a “cause-and-effect” tool that saves you time incrementally. Don’t worry – it’s relatively easy to setup, and eventually, you’ll outgrow its limited capacity and move onto better automation tools. In the meantime, there’s literally hundreds of different recipes to explore that you can utilize out there, and I’ve curated the most important ones for automating a part of your strategy.

Just remember: this doesn’t mean you don’t have to tweet anymore. You still need to put the leg work in and talk to people.

1. Automatically add people that mention your brand into a list for focused engagement

Helps With: Engagement
Difficulty: Easy

In an effort to keep your account management and tweets viewable, it’s important to list users who mention your brand or you’ve conversed with in the past. Automatically listing users can let people feel important, but it also allows you to view all tweets from the list.Add This Recipe

Tips:

• The benefits are that you now can see only the tweets from your engaged list (instead of seeing all tweets from everyone you’re following), and build a community around them.
• Downside is that auto-listing will also list people who are tweeting nasty things about your company (not that it ever happens, right?). Might be better to set your list as private, if that happens often.

2. Automatically post your new Instagram photos to Twitter

Helps With: Content
Difficulty: Easy

Remember when Twitter used to allow Instagram photos and links to appear in their feed? No? Well, they used to. Now, as you may know, posting an Instagram link to your feed will just show that crummy ol’ link. It’s time to take matters into our own hands and use an IFTTT recipe to automatically post those photos on Twitter the right way.

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Tips:

• After setting this up, when you post photos on Instagram, be mindful of the length of your description. Keep it short
• Since Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags, while Twitter is limited to 140 characters worth, use 2-3 hashtags in your Instagram description that may be relevant on Twitter as well. Afterwards, post the other 26-27 Instagram hashtags into your comments.

3. Get notified when an influencer sends a tweet

Helps With: Engagement
Difficulty: Easy

This one is a big stalker-ish, but I guarantee you that it’s important when it comes to engaging with influencers. Like a good social media manager, you’ll know that it’s important to get a thumbs-up from people with a lot of Twitter followers (even more so if it’s a celebrity). This recipe will automatically push an influencers tweet’s to you so that you can immediately respond to them or start a conversation with them. It’s great for visibility – especially if you get a reply or retweet.

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Tips:

• While I don’t think you’ll get much traction continuously bombarding @katyperry or @justinbieber for a mention, focus on influencers in your niche that you have seen tweet with people.
• It may get a little chaotic if the influencer tweets too much. You may want to limit it by notifying you when a particular keyword is involved.

4. Automatically tweet related news to your followers

Helps With: Content
Difficulty: Medium

This recipe is useful for many reasons: you’re able to share and provide interesting news to your followers, it makes you appear more active. The downsides are that without regularly engaging and conversing with other Twitter users, you may end up looking like a Twitter bot (ugh). Also, choosing the wrong news sources can either irritate your followers, and high volume news sites might drown out your primary message.

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Tips:

• Stick to sourcing a news site that doesn’t publish more than 10 articles per day.
• Create a curated feed on a news app like Feedly, then push your saved news to Twitter (or a scheduling app like Buffer) to give you more control over the content you’re tweeting.

5. Automatically tweet your new blog posts (and old ones too!)

Helps With: Content
Difficulty: Medium

The oldest trick in the book: have Twitter automatically tweet when you have a new blog post live on your site. There are many ways to do this: manually of course, but you can also use WordPress/Shopify plugins to execute it as well.

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Tips:

• I’d suggest using IFTTT instead for two reasons: (1) WordPress plugins add more server load to your website and might slow it down with too many plugins, and (2) That 15 minute buffer that IFTTT gives you between times it checks gives you an opportunity to unpublish something if you’ve noticed something wrong.
• You can extend this further by automatically tweeting all your old posts. I swear by Revive Old Post, which is a WordPress plugin that digs through your old posts and automatically tweets them at random intervals per day. You can include settings such as, “Don’t post anything prior to this date”, or “Only tweet 5 blog posts per day” for added flexibility. If you’re going to add one important plugin, this should be it.

6. Dropping an image into a folder automatically tweets it

Helps With: Content
Difficulty: Medium

It’s a bit tricky, but if you’re a volume tweeter that loves images, uploading an image on Twitter.com or through your iOS/Android app can be a pain. If you plan to load up on photos, you can always setup a free Dropbox account and dump your photos into it. IFTTT can scan a specific folder for new files and automatically tweet them for you.

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Tips:

• Before you upload them, make sure you change the filename to what your tweet will say. That’s how IFTT will populate your tweet.
• You may want to make multiple recipes if you plan to tweet photos of different types. Assign hashtags to each recipes for different folders. It might get a bit tricky to manage, but it’ll ensure you don’t tweet the wrong hashtag for a photo.