Premade Recipes Make ifttt Awesome

A while back, we found “if this then that”, a cool new way to automate some of the logistical work of your social media campaign.  “If this then that”, or just “ifttt”, is a way to write custom recipes or routines that fit your social media campaign perfectly.  That’s awesome, and what’s even more awesome is that you can share these recipes with the world.  You’re also free to use the recipes that have already been shared by others, rather than having to make them all up from scratch. Today I’m going to take a look at some of the coolest recipes I’ve found, and let you know how you can put them to work with your social media outreach.

The very first recipe listed is a great example of how you can creatively use this capability.  The recipe is descriptively titled “Every time you’re tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox”.  The recipe does exactly what the name says, and I think it’s really powerful.  It allows you to archive pictures of yourself or your business effortlessly, calls attention to pictures where you have been inappropriately tagged, and gives you the opportunity to retouch the image if it doesn’t look quite right (and you can ask the person who tagged you to use the better version instead).

Another helpful recipe reads the weather report and sends an email if the weather calls for an umbrella, and a similar recipe sends a text message option instead.  It’s so simple that it makes going to umbrellatoday.com seem like too much work.  Imagine that you’re flying to a business meeting in a couple days; wouldn’t it be great if your calendar was leveraged to auto-send an an update on what weather to pack for?  These small automatons can make huge differences when time is precious.

Other recipes can automatically thank folks for following you on twitter, post your last.fm songs to your facebook, or send your “liked” google reader posts straight to Instapaper for offline reading on the train.  ifttt is very powerful on its own, but the ability to share the recipes makes this site a monster of a social media tool and definitely my new favorite.