One of the Best Social Media Tools for Twitter
There’s something mind-numbing about Twitter.
It is an endless stream of (often) disparate thoughts, images, and link after link after link. On good days, sifting through your Twitter stream feels like floating on a pleasant sea of information. On bad days, it’s more like being buried under an avalanche. These feelings only intensify when you’re trying to create content for Twitter on a consistent basis to engage your audience, find potential clients in top-of-the-funnel marketing, and build brand awareness.
The solution?
Smart automation.
A fantastic example of smart automation is the site IFTTT.com, which stands for If This Then That. It is a free service (at the time of this writing) that automates routine social media-related tasks for you.
The premise behind the site is simple, really. It uses a formula that functions on the basic principle “if this happens, then that happens”--if this then that. It’s a content triggering device. You publish on Facebook, for example, and that new post automatically becomes a new tweet on your Twitter account, a new post on your LinkedIn account, and a new article on your Tumblr blog. You can specify the formula to push specific kinds of posts to different social media accounts--i.e. only image posts or only text posts, etc.
In a recent HubSpot article, Adrienne Smith explained it this way:
Users can build "recipes” according to their needs, or leverage the recipes that already exist. Want Twitter mentions sent to you via Slack? IFTTT can do that. Want every Facebook image you’re tagged in sent to Dropbox? IFTTT can do that, too. Not only does this tool help me keep our company's accounts active without constantly being online, but it also helps me automate social “admin” tasks.
Besides automatically pushing content into tweet-form for you whenever you post on another social media account other than Twitter, IFTTT can help you organize all of that mind-number Twitter information so that you can better organize all of your followers and hashtags. For example, as Smith notes, you can create recipes that:
Save the names, locations, follower count, following count, and profile link of your new Twitter followers into a Google Drive sheet. You can then review your top followers with ease.
Save the performance of a hashtag you create into a Google Drive sheet for later analysis. IFTTT has a recipe where you have it save the author, text, and post URL of every share that your hashtag receives.
These are just a few examples of what IFTTT can do. It takes a little time to set up your recipes (though it is user-friendly and simple, thankfully), but it is worth it.
Contact us for more helpful social media marketing tips about the top social media tools to use right now.
