If you recall my previous post on using ifttt.com and BufferApp to automate and time shift twitter posts, as well as my post on auto-emailing yourself Snopes.com articles, you’ll know I’m a big fan of ifttt.com and all it can do to help you automate content posting thereby reducing administrative overhead.
Today’s post is no different. You see, ifttt.com recently added Feedly as a channel to their ever-growing lineup. The inclusion of Feedly has opened a world of potential to users of BufferApp, HootSuite, and Tumblr. Why these three, specifically? All three sites allow you the advantage of queueing your posts for publishing at a later time. This allows an administrator/curator to throttle the content flow to the right cadence for their audience and avoid the potential of flooding the readers with too much.
But that functionality was already available in those channels before Feedly was added, so why am I excited with this new addition… especially when there was already an RSS channel available as a trigger? Simple: the Feedly triggers will pull in not only new posts from single sources, but new posts from entire categories or tags containing multiple sources. In effect this allows for a single ifttt.com recipe to pull in content from a wide swatch of RSS feeds and send the content to the channel of your choice. The potential here is actually quite exciting, as I can now more efficiently curate larger amounts of content from across the web and queue it up back-to-back for publication on a schedule I create and control. Plus, this also allows me to control the sources in the categories/tags without having to adjust/disable/delete a recipe.
Rather than stepping you through the recipe creation, I’ve shared one of the recipes which will take an article from Feedly and send it to your Tumblr queue for publishing later: https://ifttt.com/recipes/103637
This will allow you to either directly reuse this recipe for your own needs, or at least look at it to see how simple the process really is, and how much time it can save you. While there are indeed limits to what you can trigger on and the actions you can take, the potential of ifttt.com is near limitless, especially for automating content feeds in a smart fashion. If you are in social business or content marketing, you owe it to yourself to check this out and see how you can use it to help make your own life easier as well. Remember, this automation is only intended to ease some pain of manual post creation. It doesn’t take the place of actual social engagement; rather it helps you focus on the right things to do and not spend time on the logistics of doing it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.