Marketing with IFTTT: A Bufferchat Recap

Anne Mercogliano, the VP of Marketing at IFTTT, stopped by #bufferchat this week to share her insights about using automation to support marketing. During the chat, our community discussed ways to incorporate automation into a social media strategy, awesome IFTTT life hacks, their favorite marketing IFTTT recipes, and much more!

Read on to discover all of the amazing ideas and thoughts that were shared during the chat.

Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, at TWO times every Wednesday for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and community managers. Same topic, same place, just at different times – feel free to join in to whichever chat time works best for you!

For our community in Asia and Australia (or anyone in other timezones that like this time the best!): 4 pm AEST (Sydney time, UTC+10)

For our community in North/South America, Europe and Africa (or others!): 9 am PT (California time)

This week’s stats:
1st Bufferchat: 62 participants; 302 tweets; reach of 880, 782
2nd Bufferchat: 222 participants;1,137 tweets; reach of 1,637,311

Q1: What does IFTTT do, and why might someone want to give it a try in their workflow?

From Anne:

• IFTTT helps you do more with services you already use, like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, MailChimp and 100s more.
• The possibilities are endless: even knowing when someone enters space!
• We have collections to help you easily find the use case you need.

From the community:

• “iFTTT helps to create cause and effect connections between different apps. Conditional Logic.” @debbiediscovers
• “Automates certain tools/tasks. Done right it can save you time & keep you visible. Done wrong you look like a robot.” @GoldStarMedia
• “You would use IFTTT if you do a lot of the same things repeatedly (e.g., read an article, post it to Twitter).” @sbruington

See all the great answers to question 1 here!

Q2: What’s an example of a super helpful IFTTT recipe that anyone can use?

From Anne:

• Share your Instagrams as native Twitter pics — no more ugly links! [Get the recipe here.]
• Or automate recurring @Trello tasks with this simple hack. [Get the recipe here.]

From the community:

• “Tagged in a photo on FB > Save to my Dropbox! Love being able to easily keep the memories.” @juliabreathes
• “I use IF tweet liked THEN save to Pocket constantly. Great for bookmarking.” @AnnaMariaSocial
• “Created a Twitter list of engaging audience! Interested to see some creative usage!” @vvbellur

See all the great answers to question 2 here!

Q3: How does automation fit into your social media strategy?

From Anne:

• Marketers have to wear so many hats, so automation is a huge benefit when it comes to managing social media.
• Automation saves time, increases capacity, and helps you do more with less! Work smarter, not harder.

From the community:

• “Automation helps me to find people. Automatically email tweets that ask questions about my business/topic.” @Traci_Poole
• “It helps keep a constant voice, but regular interaction/engagment is what keeps followers checking in on you!” @leilachangMIA
• “We used @IFTTT to turn on this lava lamp when we get leads. We’re working on a light-up rocket ship next!” @milestech

See all the great answers to question 3 here!

Q4: How can you use an automation tool like IFTTT to better engage with your community/audience?

From Anne:

• Keep track of your community! If you’re a local business, see who’s tweeting in your area. [Get the recipe here.]
• Build Twitter lists from hashtags to find people talking about your industry. [Get the recipe here.]
• Our social media collection has more great hacks.

From the community:

• “Adding people you just met to a calendar and a map so you’ll never forget where you met them.” @debbiediscovers
• “FTTT was incredibly useful for tracking hashtag use during a trade show – we auto-created a Twitter list!” @lalalalaurav
• “Setting up to not lose great content or UGC – too much impermanence in this here digital age.” @BendandBrew

See all the great answers to question 4 here!

Q5: What is the IFTTT recipe that you couldn’t market without?

From Anne:

• We can’t pick just 1! Our collection for marketers has all of our faves.

From the community:

• “I think setting the Asana tasks to Google Calendar. Also, I love the making photos from Instagram native recipe.” @bellametaphor
• “Sending @Pocket favorites to @buffer is my favorite @IFTTT recipe!” @newmedian
• “Redirecting any mentions/@ replies of our company Twitter to a @SlackHQ channel. Saves so much time!” @TheKerriLu

See all the great answers to question 5 here!

Q6: What are some great resources to help you learn more about using IFTTT for marketing?

From Anne:

• Our new blog shares tons of tips, for anyone interested in doing more with IFTTT.
• We also regularly update our Marketers Collection.

From the community:

• “I have an [IFTTT] recipe that sends me a daily email with a new recipe. Which is very meta.” @AdvInWriting
• “Find someone who uses IFTTT well and chat with them. I call that “social.” ;)” @joshmccormack
• “@ifttt‘s blog, this #bufferchat, and that amazing @buffer blog article! [The Big List of IFTTT Recipes for Social Media] @adenastudios

See all the great answers to question 6 here!

Q7: What “recipe” or automation do you wish existed? (Maybe it does!)

From Anne:

• IFTTT adds new Channels regularly, so check in to see what’s possible.
• You can also subscribe to our blog to learn when new Channels, and possibilities, go live.

From the community:

• “Take InstaStories, stitch them together into a video & post later to @instagram as a vid post.” @SimTara
• “A recipe that reminds me to contact someone who I have not contacted in a while and provides me with pointers to do so.” @ideakid88
• “I wish for automatic and accurate image description for social media — great that I can add it, but would love to automate it.” @NeilMilliken

See all the great answers to question 7 here!

Thank you so much to Anne for sharing all of her wonderful insights, and to everyone who participated in this chat!

Catch #bufferchat each Wednesday at 9 am PST, 12 pm EST, 5 pm BST (GMT+1)  OR at 4 pm AEST (Sydney time, UTC+10). Join our Slack community with over 2,000 members to continue these awesome conversations all week long!

Do you have any comments or answers to these questions? Leave your thoughts in the comments! We’d love to hear from you!

Image sources: UnSplash