IFTTT stands for If This then That, and their service is one that lets you create seamless connections between web services such as Instagram, popular website, payment systems or your mobile phone. It consists of channels, triggers and actions.
A channel, such as Facebook, Evernote, Email or a Weather App on your phone can be told to do something specific when it is triggered. A trigger can something such as “When I take a picture”, or “When I’m mentioned on twitter”. Once a channel is triggered, you can set an action to go with it – for example, when your business is mentioned on Twitter, you can set it to create a new line in a spreadsheet. This way, without any effort, you have a searchable spreadsheet of all your brand mentions in one place.
We’ve compiled a list of our top 10 IFTTT recipe to automate your small business, save you time, and help you get more organised. Check out the list below!
1 – Read this week’s popular Business Day Articles
This recipe allows you to have the popular Business Day articles sent to you in a digest to your email, for you to read up on and get up to speed with all the top business news. Whilst the example links to the NY Times – you can do this with UK alternatives such as BBC News Business, or Smallbusiness.co.uk. (You could even set it up so all Direct365 blogs go to your email!)
2 – Sync your Social Channels
If you post a link to Facebook, have that post also be created and tweeted out on your Twitter accounts. This will link your Facebook and twitter, therefore saving you time and efficiency when managing your social channels.
3 – Keep a log of your time at work
You can set IFTTT to create a new row in a Google Drive spreadsheet whenever you enter a set area (such as work, school or home), allowing you to track how much time you have spent at work more efficiently, as well as factor in days off and late starts!
4 – Log your Google Calendar Entries
Can’t quite remember which meeting you were in last week? No worries – here they all are in a handy spreadsheet for you to sift through. This is great for documenting and backdating your activities. This recipe can be enhanced by creating a new calendar and using it for keeping track of the work you’ve done, for example: Entering 3 hours of social media, 2 hours of content writing, 30 minutes lunch – with this, you will have a spreadsheet that documents what you worked on each day.
5 – Post your blogs to Facebook (and more…)
There are plenty of Recipes that incorporate WordPress into them, which are handy, since it’s one of the most popular blogging platforms for small businesses. With this recipe, and other similar ones, you can have your latest blog entries sent directly to your Facebook as soon as it is posted. This saves you the time of having to manually send out your blog updates and allows you to get on with whatever is next on your to do list!
6 – Remind employees to turn in time sheets
This Recipe will allow you to utilize the business social network Yammer to remind your employees to turn in their monthly or weekly timesheets, which can be useful if you’re prone to forgetting. Of course, you could create a similar recipe to remind your employees of anything, on a particular date or over a period of time and this can be sent to Yammer, email, Twitter or anywhere you set it. Have a play around!
7 – Payments Accepted via Square tracked in a spreadsheet
Utilising the Square channel, this recipe allows you to keep track of any payments your business has accepted and place them into a spreadsheet. This can be incredibly useful and simplistic when reviewing your payments and transactions at the end of the day, week or month as well as saving a lot of time on tedious admin tasks, whilst eliminating the possibility of human error.
8 – Star an email? Create a reminder!
If you’re prone to starring emails and forgetting about them, this recipe may just be for you. You can set IFTTT to run every time you star an email in Gmail (And other email channels) and add it to your reminders (Whether that’s on iOS or Android, using Google Keep or Google Now Reminders). This makes it much harder to forget about!
9 – Get weather notifications daily
Is your business weather dependent such as a coffee shop, outdoor attraction or even a market stall? This recipe will prepare you for the day by notifying you of the weather conditions and forecast for the day, so you can plan ahead, get more staff, or prepare your social media marketing plan for the day to pull in the right customers!
10 – Mute my device when I get to the office!
If you like to have your phone on loud at home, but often forget to turn it onto silent when you get to work, or in a meeting, this recipe will automate the process for you, saving the embarrassment of forgetting!
Switch out recipes to your preferred channels
Of course, IFTTT is fully customisable, so if you’re an iPhone users, instead of Android, you can easily switch out some of our linked recipes to match. If you prefer Microsoft OneDrive instead of Google Drive, you can switch this out too!
The recipes we’ve linked for you are more for inspiration than they are to be directly subscribed to, although if the shoe fits…
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