What's new in Social Media: If this, then that

By Ellison Bloomfield Each morning when I wake up I check my email, twitter, instagram, path and facebook accounts and throughout the day I'm updating, adding and checking these accounts (and multitude of other profiles and accounts). Obviously this is time consuming and as anyone who is using multiple social media profiles will know there are often cross over points between streams. Something happening in one place can trigger something you want to happen in another place which means a manual process to get this to happen.

Enter ifttt - if this then that, which is a tool which allows you to set up triggers for activities to save you having to do it yourself. When this [trigger] happens then do this [action].

Ifttt works with a number of different channels including the most popular social media sites blogger, facebook, foursquare, flickr, gmail, the list goes on.

By creating tasks you can manage triggers, 'I post a photo to instagram' and create an action 'Save this file to dropbox'. You can set up your own tasks and share this with others which turns it into a recipe. When you go to the recipes tab you can see the tasks set up by others which you can then use and add to your tasks. This means you don't have to create it yourself (saving even more time).

There might be tasks or actions you want to do on a particular channel but the channel doesn't have the functionality to do it. By using ifttt you can create the actions you want and get the internet to work for you. If for any reason you don't need a task you can turn it off and when you need it again turn it back on and it will pick up again just like a new task.

Ifttt is simple to sign up to and the 1,000,000 plus recipes set up already are a simple starting point and provide you with an idea of what the service can help you to achieve.

Ellison Bloomfield is a Senior Analyst in Social Media at Deloitte. Her blog – Humane Resource has received world-wide attention and Ellison is frequently quoted as a thought leader on HR issues both within Australian and international publications. She can be found on twitter and pinterest @EllisonAmy