Automation is great when it works and one automation tool bloggers look for is something that will take new blog posts and post them to their social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. There are many social media plugins that help readers link or like blog posts but not as many that gracefully do that for the blogger.
Here’s one that is simple and kind of cool — IFTTT
IF THIS THEN THAT
With this free service you set up “recipes” by creating a trigger (THIS) and an action (THAT). So for this exercise we want to set up this recipe:
If I publish a new blog post (THIS) then I want it to then post to my Facebook page (THAT).
Here’s how you do it. First go to the IFTTT website and join and click to create a recipe. Follow the steps below (click on an image to make it bigger)
Step 1 – Click the blue “this” link.
Step 2 – Select your trigger channel by typing feed in the search box and then click the “Feed” icon. A blog feed is the perfect channel to use because every post is published to your feed.
Step 3 – Click “New Feed Item”
Step 4 – Type in the feed for your blog which is usually your blog url followed by /feed and then click Create Trigger
Step 5 – Click the blue “that” link
Step 6 – Type “facebook” in the action channel search box since we want to post to Facebook and then click on the appropriate icon for your purpose. I’m going to post to my page so I’ll click on Facebook pages.
Step 7 – Then click on “create a link post”
Step 8 – It will default to EntryURL which is want you want. If you want some additional text in the post, type that into the message box. Click Create Action.
Step 9 – Review the recipe and then click Create Recipe.
That’s it! The next time you publish a blog post, it will be posted to Facebook within approximately 15 minutes.
There are an incredible number of recipes you can create and IFTTT gives you a lot of examples to get the ideas flowing.
Why not try it out now.
