Following up on this post: “Getting Started: Social media for your rally team” I want to give you some more insights on pushing content to social media. The included graphic is my Recipes for IFTTT (If This Then That). I trigger events with Instagram now, and I’ll give you some more tips for successful social.
Picture Posts
A picture is worth MORE than 1000 words on Social Media. Text updates are all but ignored by your followers on Facebook, Twitter is getting that way, and Instagram was picture focused from the beginning.
Walled Gardens
Try to post directly on the Social Site of choice if you can. While automation is nice and handy, this IFTTT shared post will hardly bee seen on Facebook, because it didn’t get posted directly to the site. Both Facebook and Twitter suppress outside shared posts, and Instagram is a straight up walled garden. You have to work with the system to overcome this.
- Facebook owns Instagram. It appears that anything posted and shared is 1:1
- Facebook “hates” Twitter. It appears that anything shared here is suppressed
- Twitter “hates” Facebook. Seen a Facebook share on Twitter? It’s a mess
- Instagram can only post to Instagram
- Instagram posts shared to Twitter are also a mess
- Thank goodness Instagram recently added profile switching 🙂
My Recipes for IFTTT
The goal is to get native picture shares on all 4 sites. I now use Instagram to post pictures that also share to Facebook. I use a great IFTTT recipe for native Instagram picture posts to Twitter and I save the photos to my Flickr feed. From Flickr, I post it to the Rallynotes.com Tumblelog on WordPress. New article posts on rallynotes.com (like the one you’re reading) push to Facebook and Twitter automatically, but as I said: They won’t be viewed by your followers any where near the number of times if you posted the article directly to Facebook. Algorithms, YAY! 😀