When IFTTT launched in late 2011, tech publications lauded the startup as a haven for nerds. Almost a year later, the same may be true for IFTTT, a website that connects digital channels, from RSS feeds and social networks to cell phones and email clients, into an "If This Then That" formula. But these days, IFTTT is catching a lot more commercial success, in part due to its simple, powerful and easy-to-use interface, but mostly because it simplifies everything.
In celebration of simplifying social media, here are the top 5 ways that IFTTT Twitter automations can simplify your life:
1. Automatically greet a new Twitter follower
Instead of sending messages to new followers individually thanking them for following you, use this IFTTT recipe. First, connect the Twitter channel to IFTTT, then enable the recipe and customize the message that's sent to new followers. In using IFTTT, you can turn recipes on and off as you like, so if the recipe isn't working as you'd like it, just turn it off to edit it, then turn it back on when you're ready.
2. Automatically thank for a RT
With this recipe, anytime you are '@' mentioned on Twitter, IFTTT will tweet a message thanking for the mention. Again, you can customize the message sent in the recipe to whatever you want; you can even include a link to the original tweet where you were mentioned. This recipe is a great way to re-engage anyone who has mentioned you, automatically.
3. Add @ mentions to private engagers list
Another automation to help organize your Twitter following is to automatically add anyone who '@' mentions you to a private engagers list. This way, you can keep track of anyone who has interacted with you, in a special list. With this IFTTT, you won't have to do any additional work adding users to lists: just let the recipe do the work.
4. Create a new list from a hashtag
Keeping track of a Twitter chat can be pretty difficult at times. There are a myriad of tools to help you record and monitor Twitter chats, but how can you keep track of all the people you've interacted with? This automation adds any user who mentions a hashtag that you indicate to a list in your Twitter account. It's a simple solution to keeping track of who participated in a Twitter chat: just update the hashtag to the one you want to monitor, and the recipe does the rest.
5. Email notification from Twitter search
Gathering large amounts of information from Twitter can be a time consuming process without help from analytics software or access to Twitter's API. Instead, this IFTTT recipe searches Twitter for a keyword that you indicate and sends you an email when a result is matched. If you're worried about flooding your inbox with messages from this recipe on IFTTT, you can set up a filter to automatically archive messages from IFTTT in Gmail: this way, the messages from IFTTT skip your inbox, but you can still read them when you have time.
Thomas Samph is a writer at Grovo.com, an online Internet education and training platform, where you'll find everything from IFTTT help to how to use Google+.