One thing that keeps coming up with my clients is social media automation. The only one-size fit’s all accounts option that I’ve found so far costs around $70 per month at the low end. That’s out of my budget and my client’s too.

So, I’ve been exploring IFTT to figure out some work arounds.

While it’s still not perfect by any means, I’m finding ways to make it work. This post is partly a test to see if everything works together the way it should.

I use Jetpack plugin with my self hosted wordpress site. With the social function, Jetpack pushes my new posts to several social media accounts that I’ve chosen. In this case, my Facebook page, and Twitter account.

From there, I have an IFTT recipe (that’s what they call it when you set up to have something happen after something else happens) to publish from my Facebook page to my Pinterest account if I use the hashtag #pin. We’ll have to see if it works.

So far, the other social media account that I’m having trouble accessing automatically is Instagram. While IFTT has a recipe or two (quite a few more, actually), there is actually no way to automate the blog post to go from here to Instragram which means I have to manually upload this post to my Instagram account, then the IFTT recipe would kick in and several other things would happen depending on what the recipe called for.

That’s mostly because so far, Instagram doesn’t have approved API’s for automated content. They want to you to actually be on their site (or phone app) and have to interact. I don’t blame them, it just makes it harder to cut down on our time spent trying to update all the social media accounts, you know?

Anyway. I’ll let you know what happens with an update after I publish!

Thanks for reading and if you’re confused, I might be too!

Jenn