2014-11-24

Automating Blog Retweets

I love IFTTT – it is a simple way to automate things.

If This Then That. If something happens – then do something else. I am already using a number of IFTTT recipes to help me in automating my daily life.

I do not use Wordpress – Blogger suits my needs very well, It has its upsides and downsides.

When I publish a blog post – I like to update my social networks with the announcement. At the moment this is manual process. And I had enough.

I went to my friend IFTTT to help me out.

A new recipe that finds a new tweet by me.

IFFTT_1

and then push it to buffer

IFFTT_2

Two major issues here. One I only want to push certain tweets – not everything.

That could be solved by changing the trigger to a tweet by me with a hashtag

IFFTT_3

But my biggest problem was that I have not control of when the tweet should be scheduled something which I can do with the buffer interface as you can see below.

buffer schedule

Zapier to the rescue.

The basic account is free for 5 zaps (recipes in IFTTT language) and 100 tasks per month.

My first tweet is always done manually after I publish the post. The format is always as follows:

New Blog Post | <Blog_post_title> – <URL>

So the logic behind my automation was as follows

process flow

It will look for a text – and also check if this is already a retweet of my previous post – otherwise I will get an endless loop. Then schedule it for a specific time.

Zapier does not enable me to do multiple actions – which is OK – so I created another 2 zaps for the additional times I wanted to schedule the tweets.

This is what the zap looks like

step 1

step 2

step 3

step 4

step 5

Hope this is useful.

Just a small note as to why I re-tweet multiple times. because of time zone differences and exposure – that is all.