We get questions like how can I update facebook from my WordPress blog. Or how can I automatically tweet every time I publish a new blog post. There are tons of plugins for that, but we are about to show you a method that doesn’t require any plugins. IFTTT is a robust service that lets you create simple “if this then that” actions. If you can think of an action (trigger), then you can have IFTTT do something else (re-actions) as a result. While it is impossible to automate WordPress and social media entirely, IFTTT really puts the internet to work for you. In this article, we will show you how to automate WordPress and social media with IFTTT.
What is IFTTT?
IFTTT stands for “if this then that”. It is a service that lets you create powerful actions using triggers and actions. The image below will explain it all:
How can you use it?
This service goes way beyond WordPress. You can select from one of the many available channels to automate your online life. You can automatically tweet your new posts. You can automatically share your new posts on facebook page or profile. You can pull posts from RSS into WordPress etc. Below is a list of few channels they have:
How to use IFTTT with WordPress?
Go to IFTTT and create your account. IFTTT works with all WordPress.org self-hosted blogs (version 3.x and above) and WordPress.com blogs as well. You MUST have XML-RPC enabled to work with IFTTT.
Go to Settings » Writing and enable XML-RPC
Once you have done that, you are ready to go and use WordPress as the trigger.
Possible Use Cases:
Below is a list of possible use cases with WordPress. For more look at IFTTT WordPress Channel.
- WordPress to Facebook Fan Page
- WordPress to Facebook Profile
- WordPress to Twitter
- WordPress to Google+
- WordPress to Tumblr
- WordPress to Evernote
- WordPress to LinkedIn
- WordPress to Delicious
- WordPress to Blogspot (Blogger)
- WordPress to Diigo
- WordPress to Buffer
- WordPress to DropBox (Backup each post)
- WordPress to Google Drive (Backup each post)
- WordPress to Flickr
- WordPress to Zootool
- WordPress to Hootsuite
- WordPress to Google Calendar
- WordPress to Bitly
- WordPress to Instapaper
- WordPress to Read Later
- WordPress to SkyDrive (backup each post)
- WordPress to App.net
- WordPress to SMS
- WordPress to Phone Call
And the list could probably go on. By the way, a lot of those could be reversed in order as well. For example, RSS to WordPress, Twitter to WordPress, FB to WordPress etc.
Conclusion
IFTTT is a great tool, and we can see a lot of good coming out of it. Just from a list above, you can easily delete a few plugins that you may have running on your site and have IFTTT do those tasks. In what ways are you going to use IFTTT? Will you use IFTTT? Why or Why not. Let us know in the comments.
Great post. Thank you.
I love IFTTT but I am trying to use it with a WordPress.com blog that I have marked as private (using it as a personal journal). However, I would like to access the RSS via IFTTT for backup.
I am getting this error when I try to link to the blog RSS: Not a valid feed url, missing feed title
Do you think this is because the blog is marked private? Or is there something else going wrong? (I tried your suggestion to enable XML-RPC, but I don’t see that option in my settings.
Thank you!
Yes it is because your blog is set to private.
When I try to connect WordPress to IFTTT it says:
Live channel fields value is not a valid WordPress url
Unable to verify WordPress credentials. Please try again.
Am I missing something? Thanks
It doesn’t seem to work with my wordpress.com blog, unless of course I am doing something completely retarded.
Can anyone verify this please?
Thanks
Dan
It should work fine. You can also use the RSS method.
Thanks a lot for making my blogging life easier !
This is quite cool. The backup to Dropbox or Google drive is good but my question is: how the backup of any post looks like? I think I should try for myself, shouldn’t I.
The problem (at least until recently) was for the Facebook to work nicely with WordPress and grab the featured image or the image in the post as well as the excerpt. I wonder how this service pulls out the excerpt and the post image?
If you have the proper og: tags defined, then Facebook will pull the image. As for per post backup, it stores the post as PDF.
The other way around it’s even more useful, that it fetches yr social media blurbs, and archive them in YOUR own space. WordPress is all about owning and controlling your own content, and that way you can preserve, bundle, and display all yr tweets, fb status updates etc. in one centrally managed hub.
For a personal blog, it doesn’t get any more personal than that.
Totally agreed. It pulls from RSS, FB, Twitter, and all sorts of places.
I use IFTTT to auto tweet and facebook all my new posts on my blog. It’s good, but my only complaint is that it only activates once every 30 minutes.
I already use IFTTT with Google Drive to backup my blog posts, and it works amazingly.
There’s only one thing that I have been trying to find a solution though. When I update an already published post, how to get a backup of that! Still trying to figure out
At this time, IFTTT does not support Google+, and therefore your “WordPress to Google+” recipe suggestion is invalid.
This is really AWESOME, wow! Thanks for that great tip!
I wonder whether it’s possible to replace the good old feedburner mail subscription with IFTTT?
I’ve only found the possibility, to create a receipe at IFTTT to send my/any feed to my (!) e-mail address. But how to offer the own blog visitors the possibility for a mail subscription to get the newest posts (as in normal RSS)? Isn’t that possible with IFTTT or has anybody another suggestion?
No that is not possible with IFTTT. You would have to use a service like MailChimp or Aweber.
While email subscriptions are not possible with IFTTT, you can use the Jetpack Email Subscriptions plugin.
For Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumbler, I’ve found that Jetpack’s Publicize tool has worked very well.
I had been using IFTTT for all of the above and switched over to Jetpack.
Yes, there are cool plugins in WordPress that can do the job as well. But if you are only going to use Jetpack for that feature, then you might as well just use IFTTT. Again, Jetpack offers a lot more that everyone might not need/want.
I heard that Jetpack is quite “heavy” on a WordPress site…
I have literally skim read this, and it looks great. I’m hoping when i get time later tonight to read it fully that it fulfils what im after. Posting blog posts to facebook or twitter automatically is something i’ve wanted to build into my themes for a while