Use This Automation Hack to Archive Your Social Media Life – Reade Milner

If you have read my blogs before, you know I believe in intentionality with regards to using social media for building a platform and/or for marketing a business. At the same time, I’m also a bigger fan of getting things done. I like to say that my favorite color is “done”. That means that things like new web automation and social media scheduling tools give me a more-than-healthy dose of adrenaline, especially if I can use them to save time and be more effective in my work. With that said, I am really excited to share one of my favorite social media hacks for recording and analyzing your social media posts.

 

 

If This Then That, (or IFTTT) is a web application that connects two programs to create a cause-effect relationship between them. For example, one “recipe” allows you to automatically add a new entry into a Google Drive spreadsheet for each new tweet. Another one automatically downloads new Gmail attachments to Dropbox.

In this case, I really like using IFTTT to create a more lateral view of my upcoming and past social media posts. This particular recipe connects a Buffer account with a Gmail calendar and adds a new entry for each new scheduled post (get it here). This allows me to not only see what posts I have coming up, but what I’ve posted in the past and when. There is obviously a practical benefit of seeing what posts are coming up, in order to make sure that new posts are relevant. This may seem unimportant, but its a tip Guy Kawasaki could have used. Unfortunately for him, his automated system earned him a bad rep during the Boston Marathon bombing, when he kept tweeting irrelevant content. While completely innocent, it made him appear insensitive. Don’t be that guy.

The second great benefit is that you can go back and analyze your effectiveness by comparing your tweet times. I like to go back at the end of the week and see what times of the week generate the best response. I can tweak the next week’s schedule based on the trends. For example, if I see that the AM posts are getting lots of retweets, comments, or other types of engagement, I’ll shift my tweet schedule so that more posts go off in the morning versus the afternoon. As business management guru Peter Drucker made famous the maxim, “What gets measured, gets managed.”

Give IFTTT a shot and see how you can increase your effectiveness and save time. Be careful, you may become an automation-addict (like me)!