IFTTT — Medium

IFTTT Of late, I’ve been thinking about writing some stuff on new products that I come across , i.e those which are both exciting and useful. This is a part of series where I would be reviewing some products (mostly software). Like many technical guys do, I also fell victim to a false reality that all you need is a well built , solid product in the market and success will follow almost instantly with very little work. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. I feel marketing is the most underrated segment in any sort of business and probably, the most difficult of them all. It can be exhausting and requires a lot of patience. In recent times, Social Media has grown on to become the most popular marketing channel. If you are a small business looking to sell something , the best way for you to communicate with your potential customers is through the social media channels. Most often you would need to run & maintain multiple accounts — most notably Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Here comes a major problem if you are an indie developer like me or a small team with very limited resources. Hiring a dedicated social media manager who regularly updates your Facebook fan pages, tweets relevant stuff related to your business and links together other stuff, might not be practically feasible due to your budget constraints. However, if you don’t have a good social media presence, your business or product will most likely lack visibility and is less likely to sell. I’ve been looking for a service that would simplify some of this social media management stuff so that I can do this all by myself . i.e looking out for something that would help me to manage multiple social media accounts and effect some chain actions that would increase the visibility and keep the accounts active. something that would work even when I’m on holiday with no access to a computer and an internet connection. Like a virtual Social Media Manager doing basic stuff like posting stuff, triggering actions based on conditions that I can configure stuff like that. Enter IFTTT. IFTTT is the abbreviation of “If This Then That” . IFTTT allows one to create chains of simple conditional statements, called “recipes”, which are triggered based on changes to other web services such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. This is how Wikipedia has it. Here is an example of an IFTTT “recipe” that I’ve created after linking my Twitter account. This “recipe” would automatically post a tweet that I have set up from my account every morning at 11:30 am. You would probably be thinking, What’s the big deal in this? There are plenty of apps out there that allows one to automate tweets. Yes I agree, IFTTT is not doing anything new here, but look at some of the recipes below. There are tons of recipes like these cross linking multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slack among many others. Isn’t this awesome? Some of the recipes are just invaluable. I really love some of the Twitter recipes because they are more relevant to my business and help me reach out to potential customers. Summarising IFTTT can be your virtual Mini Social Media Manager doing some cool stuff hence helping you in promoting your business.