Socially Doing More

For me trying to be more social is not a trivial task. But you can learn so much if you just put some effort into it. In my last blog post I mentioned a service called Buffer. Buffer seems pretty good so far. Still need to play with it more but it is nice that I can just put something out that isn't time sensitive and Buffer will send it towards Twitter and Facebook. While the Twitter side of Buffer is pretty nice as it gives some analytics as to what has happened with your post, the Facebook side of Buffer seems a little irrelevant at this point other than scheduling posts. But I think I've found a better way...

Because Buffer only currently deals with Twitter and Facebook I still need to manually update the other social services I belong to. Enter If This Then That! This tool allows you to do a LOT of social site management automatically. (I'm really limiting what the site can do - check it out yourself.)

Using If This Then That (ifttt) I've re-used Recipes and some Tasks that automate posting to multiple sites. Here is what a ifttt Task looks like:

To give an example here is how this blog post will be announced.

1. When I post this blog Blogger will ask me if I want to post an announcement to my linked Google+ account, I will do that
2. An ifttt Task will see that I have a Public Google+ post and stuff that into my Buffer account as a Twitter update, it will prepend #li and #fb in that Tweet
3. The Buffer service will post the newly created Tweet to Twitter at that pre-determine time by Buffer
4. When Buffer posts to Twitter the Twitter post will have #li and #fb in the Tweet
5. #li will be recognized by ifttt which will trigger another Task that will repost that Tweet to my LinkedIn profile as a status update
6. #fb will be recognized by ifttt which will trigger another Task that will report that Tweet to my Facebook profile as a status update

Of course this really only works if you WANT to repost everything to every social site you belong to. In this case I do and the main trigger here is that the original post was a public post. That works for me!