Hey guys, guess what time it is? Time for a mortifying social media fail! *sigh* My lesson-learned is your cautionary tale.
This morning I posted the above Instagram picture, noting that part of my plans for the day include sorting through that huge pile of watch faces so I can post them to my Etsy shop. (It’s the last of my stock, and I’m a little concerned about what to do when they sell because I don’t have an ongoing source for them. They were a lucky score on eBay, most of them still attached to their quartz movements. But I digress.) I selected the options in IG to also share on Twitter and Flickr, and hesitated over the Facebook option. Did I really want to share that with my friends on FB? It would be a bit more sensible to post it to the shop’s fan page.
“Oh, but IFTTT can do that!” I remembered. And then it hit me. Oh. Crap. A couple days ago I’d set up IFTTT to do that… with all my Instagram pictures. Resisting the urge to pound my head on my desk a few times, I opened up a new tab and hurried over to my fan page. There is was. Pictures of pets being cute, pretty flowers in my backyard – along with a few legitimately shop-related pics – all ten Instagram photos I’d taken in the past day, posted to my fans. Not only that, but they’d all been automatically captioned with a note saying that more about that picture could be seen on my blog, with a link back here.
After a bit of fiddling around trying to figure out how to edit, move, or remove the various photos – and a panicky moment when I realized I’d made the same error with LinkedIn – I set up a new recipe. Better, fast, stronger. Well, better and more specific, anyhow.
How humiliating. What a rookie mistake. Eager to put it behind me and pretend like it didn’t happen, I tried to figure out what was next on my to-do list. Oh, a blog post? Well, maybe I’ll just share this little experience. So here goes, my important lesson on how to use IFTTT without looking like a spammy jerk:
- Never use any trigger that says “Any time I ____” if you can choose one that’s more specific. In this example, I replaced my Instagram to Facebook recipe with two more complex ones: my Instagram pictures tagged #aroundthestudio go to an album on my fan page name Around The Studio (which links to my blog in the album description, but not in photo descriptions because not every studio image gets blogged), and my Instagram pictures tagged #etsyitems go to the album Products (with a link to my Etsy shop’s main page added to the descriptions via IFTTT). Build in the complexity with every recipe, and take the time to set up a good framework. IFTTT puts your social media cross-promotions on autopilot, but any autopilot system is only as smart as the person setting them up. You’d never set the autopilot on a plane to “fly to Chicago” when you really mean “fly to O’Hare Airport” – better still, how about the specific part of the tarmac you mean, so you don’t land on top of another plane or a terminal full of people?
To quote Confucius, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” (Tweet this ♥) I hope this little story helped you. Did you get some ideas on how to fine-tune your IFTTT recipes or other systems like HootSuite, Pingraphy, or Buffer?
