Are you new to IFTTT? Then check out this article

For my two photography businesses, I have about 9 billion different social media services, profiles, portfolio sites, and websites. Well, maybe 9 billion is a slight exaggeration. But, just keeping up with your online presence can turn into a full-time job. I would rather be spending time with my family and going out to take a photo or two, than basking in the glow of my computer screen. Whether you are new to IFTTT.com (IF This, Then That), or have been using it for a while, these applets will help you spend less time online, automating your cross-posting, tweeting, syncing, and other trendy social media verb du jour!

Publishing with Instagram

For my workflow, I use Instagram as the starting point. Instagram has become my main platform for sharing my newest work, generating photography contacts, and getting inspiration from fellow photographers. While it does have some built-in sharing features, IFTTT gives you more control of sharing your posts. Instagram also only supports sharing to a few services within the app, while IFTTT connects Instagram to dozens more for automatic posting.

When I post an image to Instagram, IFTTT takes action, running applets for all my other connected services. A good starting point is to list out all your social media or portfolio sites, and draw a rough flowchart of how you want to keep them updated. Any of your services can be a start point, just pick the one that works best for you.

Promote your business by sharing Instagram photos with Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, & Facebook Pages This is the “Swiss army knife” of photo posting. You post something to Instagram, and it will automatically repost this to the most popular social media sites. The biggest downside to this “all in one” applet is a lack of customization options.  Personally, I like a more tailored approach, so I use site specific applets. But, if you want to run just one applet, this one is for you!

Instagram photos tagged #wp to WordPress post This will copy any Instagram post that has a hashtag you specify over to your WordPress powered site. Set this hash tag to something unique, and it will only include posts you want to send to your WordPress site. Like to post photos of your dinner but don’t want them sent to your website? Just don’t include the hashtag you specified.  You can also customize this applet, the most important is setting the status of the WordPress post. I like to post it as a “draft” so I can take a look at it before it posts live on my website. If you want to, you can set it to “published” so it auto posts live to your site without any more action on your part.

Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter There are many Instagram to Twitter applets, I prefer this one because it shows your photo, not just a text link to it. Any time you can save your audience a click, the more they will engage with your content!

Send photos to your parents using Gmail, so they don’t need Instagram Know someone who loves your photography, but avoids social media sites? This plugin lets them see your latest work via email.

More Social Media – If there is one thing you will learn from using IFTTT, there are far more social media sites than you ever imagined!

Publishing with Facebook

Nearly every applet you can find for Instagram, you can also find in a version for Facebook. Because each platform has its own quirks, I won’t duplicate all the social connections above, you can explore them all on each service’s respective page. Here are some of my favorites specific to Facebook.

Keep your Facebook and Twitter profile pictures in sync Changing your profile picture tends to generate significant traffic to your Facebook page. This handy little applet also makes the change on Twitter for you.

Back up your new Facebook photos to Google Drive This applet saves a copy of each image post you make to a folder in Google Drive. Instead of searching through Facebook to see if I have already posted an image, it is much faster to look in this folder, plus this provides a backup of those photos.

Publishing with WordPress

WordPress has evolved over the past decade from a simple blogging program to a full featured publishing platform. It is the backbone of millions of websites worldwide, and has great support on IFTTT.

Share your latest WordPress posts on Facebook and Share new WordPress posts to a Facebook Page These two applets do the same thing, move content from your WordPress website to your Facebook. The difference is one sends it to your personal profile, and one to a page. Pages represent businesses, and are not limited in numbers of followers they can have. On Facebook, it is a good idea to separate your brand from your personal profile.

Backup new WordPress posts to Google Drive – When it comes to photography, we all know how important it is to back up your work. At some point we have all probably forgotten to, maybe having lost images because of it. The same holds true for your website and online presence, if you don’t back things up, you may eventually lose them. This applet is an easy way to automatically backup all your WordPress posts, since we all know how easy it is to forget to do those backups on our own.

When you are ready to dive even deeper into IFTTT, be sure to check out my companion IFTTT article, IFTTT for Photographers, Part 2: Stay on Top of Your Photography Business.  Learn how to automate business chores to free up time for your photography!

More “IFTTT for Photographers” Articles

Can’t get enough IFTTT?  Check out the whole series of articles I have put together!