If This Then That: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Don’t you wish you had more hands or people to do all the different tasks that you need completed? If you want to keep your business running on social media there are so many places you need to be active, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WordPress Blogs, and many others. Who has the time to publish a post on each and every account? I don’t. But here is a program that will save your day: If This Then That. If This Then That or simply referred to as “IFTTT” is a web-based productivity tool that automates simple commands or tasks. PC Magazine says IFTTT is “the ultimate automation service for small tasks between Internet-connected services. Whether on the Web or with select apps on iOS and Android, IFTTT—one of our rare 5-star Editors’ Choice picks—can handle anything its member service ’channels’ support”. Like its name, the program states if a certain action or condition occurs, then another action or condition will be triggered to occur.

Why do I need to use IFTTT?

When it comes to planning social media posts and promotional items for your business, it’s important to reach as many people as you can. However, we all know that time is money and saving time means saving money, so using an automation program like “If This Then That” would help your business work smarter, not harder.

What apps use IFTTT?

When it comes to IFTTT, you can use practically use any web-based or internet-enabled “smart” item available on the market. “Smart” items are products that have internet capability connections. IFTT can create a relationship between everything from social media to smart televisions to androids, iPhones, and everything in between.

What is a web based application?

A web-based application is a product or tool that can be used or enabled online through the web browser. Technopedia says “a web-based application is any program that is accessed over a network connection using HTTP, rather than existing within a device’s memory. Web-based applications often run inside a web browser.” What this means is that instead of running on your computer, a web-based application will alwyas run on the internet.

What is a Smart product?

In recent years, the world has seen the development of smart products, which are innovative devices that communicate through the internet for instruction. These products have internal memory, hardware, and sensors that allows it to be automated through another device or stand alone. According to the Harvard Business Review: “Smart, connected products offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, much higher product utilization, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product boundaries.”

How does IFTTT work?

Automating your life can be a huge advantage to your overall productivity, but you need something to manage the automation. IFTTT uses different applets to control relationships between two items. What this means is if one task or condition is initiated, another condition is prompted to automate.

What is an applet?

An applet is a programmable conditional instruction that will be carried out. Applets are what makes IFTTT functional because they carry out the tasks. An example of an applet for Instagram is whenever a picture is posted, then the same picture will be posted on Facebook, Twitter, or can be uploaded to Google Drive.

How can IFTTT help my business?

Now that you’ve learned how you can save time and money with IFTTT, it’s time to start saving time by automating all your marketing efforts. From social media to document processing, IFTTT will be your virtual personal assistant.

Using IFTTT to share on Social Media

When it comes to sharing content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more, it’s very important to share the content on all platforms. However, logging in, pasting, scheduling and posting content can be very time consuming. Using IFTTT to automate your posts can help you be successful without having to post on each individual social media site. For example, a B2B or business-to-business client has written a blog for their website. Blogs are essential content that will help drive business through search engines, but the content needs to be shared on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With IFTTT, you can automate Facebook to LinkedIn and Facebook to Twitter, so when you post the blog content on Facebook, it will automatically push out posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Using IFTTT to support your business

When owning a small business, it is vital to be on top of your competition.  IFTTT can help you keep track of them as well as manage your productivity.

MailChimp

Gaining a large return on investment can be a difficult task for any small business owner, and email marketing has proven to be one of the best tools for ROI for small businesses. This is why it is wonderful that IFTTT can be used with MailChimp, an email marketing campaign manager, to help with efficiency. Some of the things you can do with IFTT and MailChimp include:

• Schedule campaigns to your Google calendar
• Save campaign statistic reports
• Receive notification when a new subscriber is added
• Share performance reports with team members.

Google Apps

An important part of a small business is the ability to produce, save, and retrieve data and documents for its clients. Google Apps is an online cloud service that allows you to store your documents, data, music, and much more. With IFTTT, business professionals can automate Google Apps interactions like:

• Automatically sync new files that are added to your Dropbox to Google Drive
• Track hours worked on Google Calendar
• Save new email attachments to Google Drive

What else can IFTTT do?

If you are a technology buff like us here at TheeDigital, IFTTT can do an assortment of different tasks including speech-enabled voice assistants and home automation.

Voice Activated Personal Assistants

These days, voice activated personal assistants can be your very best friend. Big hitter companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have personal assistant software that can help you with your everyday tasks. Apple’s Siri, Google Personal Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa can be paired with IFTTT to find your phone, set the mood, and compile a grocery list, which will be added to your phone’s reminder list. For example, one of our Marketing Managers at TheeDigital, Sharon Dawson, says “Whenever I ask Alexa to play a specific song, IFTTT adds that song into a list on a Google Sheet.”

Home Automation

In recent years, technology has changed immensely. Using IFTTT with your smart items allows you to change the way you live. As long as an item is attached to the internet, you can use IFTTT to automate it to do many tasks without thought. For example, have you ever left your home, but forgot to lock your door? With IFTTT, you can pair your phone with your smart-compatible door lock to automatically lock when you leave your home network.

If This Then That

Now that you are familiar with IFTTT, it’s time to put words into action. Regardless of whether you’re an advanced or novice user, IFTTT can help automate your life and business.  Now you don’t need more time in the day or additional hands to help you with the work, you just need to automate it with IFTTT.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization