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:
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
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.
I set up IFTTT to post my WordPress blog entries to the FB page. It works great, and was so easy to do!
One problem. The ‘logo’ appearing with each post comes from my WP page. It’s far too big, and gets truncated, and looks stupid. I went into the media library, created a thumbnail on my ‘logo’ graphic, and hoped it would pick that up instead. It didn’t.
Is there any way I can get IFTTT to pick up the thumbnail graphic instead of the larger one that appears at the top of the blog? Please be gentle, I am a newbie. But I have gotten so much good info from this site, appreciate it!
why do the wordpress apps in ifttt not post the featured image from the wordpress post in the social media you chose. I have so many posts that will post to lnkedin or facebook but do not post the image along with it. Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you for the tips. It took a while for the ifttt to work for my wordpress but Finally it did.
Does anyone know how to post a bunch of already published wordpress posts on facebook ?
I have a lot of old posts on a blog that I would like to gradually post on FB (with a pace of 2-5 a day).
Though ITTT has many services the problem is few of them are detailed enough to be useful. For example, there’s no way to tell it which of my Tumblr blogs to post to, nor can I have it send only certain categories to Tumblr, so the Tumblr option is useless, even though I’ve been seeking a solution to send my posts to Tumblr. Every other time I try to use ITTT I find the lack of detailed options for the services they provide doesn’t meet my needs.
Hello
please tell me
how to connect twitter accounts to my f.b pages?
Very terrible to connect self hosted WordPress blog with IFTTT. And suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Only WordPress.com is connecting. Ah! My head is heavy.
Trying to use IFTTT to push WP posts to tumblr. I get ‘external image/image not found’ message on tumblr. How might I fix this? Thanks in advance…
I have a blog,when i try sharing my links on twitter it states’ the site might be automated’
How can i fix this?
thanks! very helpful!
Thank you so much for this post. I’ve heard that plugins for auto sharing to social media can slow down a WordPress site pretty badly, so this is way better. IFTTT is brilliant, and the video combined with the instructions were extremely helpful.
It actually depends on what CMS or software the other website is using to publish content.
This is really a awesome article but my question is how can I automatically post to some non wordpress sites every time I publish a new blog post in my wordpress site. Is that possible to do. Its really helpful for me if you will write about this. thanks
How to post old WordPress posts to twitter using IFTTT?
Hej there.
I am using the IFTTT now for some time. Thanks for telling me that this exists! =)
But I have a problem, when it comes to posting images on Facebook or Twitter from my WordPress-Blog. I always have a featured image set for my posts, but if I want to create an image post on the social media, it always tells me there that the image does not exit.. Is there a trick to make it work?
I even tried making my blog post an image post, but that did not work either.
And can I adjust the recipes so that I just type in what he should show, or is that limited to what they give me (For example what I want to post in my posts, like imageURL and so on)
Thanks for the help!
You will enter your website’s url in IFTTTT
http://www.example.com
IFTTT will still get your blog feed. Make sure you have activated Twitter channel and given IFTTT permission to tweet on your behalf. After that try publishing a post and then come back to IFTTT and manually run the recipe. See if it shows you any error.
I can’t activate my WordPress BLOG as a channel:
[On IFTTT.com]
When I attempt activate WordPress posts as channel from my blog URL “mywebsite.co.uk/blog” it will not work.
IFTTT.com activate on WordPress posts as channel by typing “mywebsite.co.uk” it does indeed activate (but does not tansfer the posts from my blog page to Twitter).
Please
let me know I know if you have good idea what going wrong here thanks.
Seems like your site is setup with a static front page and a separate page for blog posts. In cases like this, your blog’s URL is still the root domain not the blog page. Sometimes it may take IFTTT a while to get your new post and tweet it. You can also try running a recipe manually and see if it triggers the action or shows any error.
You will also need to activate the Twitter channel and give IFTTT permission to post on your behalf.
Yes I do have a mutli-page site where my blog is not the font page. My front page is my Home page should be a static page and page named Blog should be categorised as a blog.
I must admit I don’t fully follow what it is you are saying and am unsure where to go from here.
Q1: What address should enter use activate and use my WP blog?
Q2: How would I run a recipe “manually”
Please kindly advise. Thanks
I had a nightmare for weeks trying to resolve this problem in the end I found out to use my feed to set it up. For example mine is put whatever your site url is and then add forward slash feed try and use that address to set it up on ifttt
Hi really cool post !
is it possible for IFTTT to make a bitly link (shotend link) under the sent post, so the readers come back to my site, or does this tool do such a thing – maybe I just have to make the bitly link (shotend link) in my WP POST before letting IFTTT send to the social platforms – somebody know if I am right or wrong?
thanks for answering !
Sheridan
I’ve recently created a ‘recipe’ on IFTTT that means whenever I retweet, it comes up on the blog on my WordPress site. However if I click on the link that comes up on WordPress, it doesn’t take me to the original Twitter feed (rather to a sub-page on my WordPress site). How can I get the link to take me from my site back to Twitter?
Might be a stupid question, and many thanks for any help! Tim.
How to post old WordPress posts to twitter using IFTTT? (Twitter account created after publishing some WordPress posts)
I recently set up ifttt to post to wordpress whenever I load a video to youtube. Is there a way to build the short code [publicize off] into the recipe so it will not post to the other sites I have linked to wordpress?
I almost pull my hair with my wp plugin.. thank you for this article. I have to join IFTTT
I just discovered this little gem of a site. Love it! One recipe I used was fb fan page to wordpress. I have a client who prefers to post everything in fb vs. her blog. Problem solved!!
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.
Then why does it ask for the WordPress username and password. Privacy settings shouldn’t matter…
Acutally I think it may just be because you version of WordPress has XML-RPC automatically enabled. Google search this to check: “WordPress (enter the version you use)” followed by “XML-RPC automatically enabled” and see what
comes up!
I use WordPress 4.0 on a wordpress.org site and that solved my
XML-RPC dilema.
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