Iffft Gets your Social Media Sites Talking

Ifttt.com is a website that makes your social media services work together. Ifttt rhymes with ‘lift’ and stands for If This Then That. When an event happens in one service, ifttt can make another service take some action.

For example, you can tell ifttt that if a friend tags you in a Facebook photo, it should always save a copy to your Dropbox account. Ifttt calls this a task:

An ifttt task

A task is made up of channels, triggers and actions.

A channel is any of over 40 services ifttt can connect with. In the example above Facebook and Dropbox are the channels. Others include Boxcar, Instagram,  Evernote, Foursquare, Linkedin, email and SMS.

A trigger is an event that makes ifttt do something. The trigger in the example is ‘a friend tags you in a Facebook photo.’

An action is what you tell ifttt to do when a trigger event happens. In this case, save a copy of a Facebook photo that you have been tagged in to Dropbox.

You can access a list of all your tasks via a dashboard, when you are logged into the site.

It’s very easy to get started. Everything is explained clearly, most of it on a single page, right here.

Twitter

One of my favourite things about ifttt is that you can use it to automatically reply to tweets. There are various options such as when someone follows you or tweets about a particular topic. I have a task that thanks people, when they mention me or RT (retweet) one of my tweets:

Responding to a Twitter message

Recipes

When you create a really useful task, you can share it with everyone, as a recipe. There is a list of all recipes on the ifttt site and you can filter by channel. It’s a good place to go for ideas for your own tasks and to see what’s possible with ifttt. This is a handy recipe created by user bbeckford:

A recipe to send you an SMS if it will be frosty tomorrow

Linking social media

The idea of linking social media together has buckets of potential. We’ll soon see a lot more apps like ifttt, both web and mobile, that integrate other services. Ifttt is already a good start, even though it’s still in beta. Why not leave a comment below, if you’ve found an interesting way to use ifttt?

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Related articles

• if this then that (ifttt.com)
• Boxcar’s Configurable Push Notifications (tonygallacher.wordpress.com)
• Connecting Your Social Media with ifttt.com (epiphanysearch.co.uk)
• Liberate your tweets: Archiving without Twitter with “If this then that” or ifttt (nextlevelofnews.com)