Automatically Share Your Tribe’s Blog Posts

We all know that sharing other people’s content is a good practice. It keeps our social media feeds active, encourages goodwill in the blogging community, and spreads quality information to the masses.

But it takes time!

And time is something I don’t have. So I set out to find a way to automate it, and I found it!

Do you have a blog tribe? I strongly suggest having one, and I’ll be writing a post soon about how to find one or start your own. But whether you have a tribe or not, you can use this tip to automatically share your favorite blogs.

The key is IFTTT (“If This, Then That,” pronounced “ift”). IFTTT allows you to use a wide variety of networks to create “recipes.” For example, you could set your phone to mute itself when you arrive at work, or save all of your Instagram photos to a Dropbox folder. The possibilities are endless, and you can browse lists of recipes that other people have created, to save for your own use or to give you ideas.

Okay, here’s how to autoshare anyone else’s blog posts:

Go to IFTTT, sign up for an account, and then go to your dashboard and click “Create a Recipe.”

You’ll see this deliciously simple page:

From here it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I’m gonna walk you through it anyway, because I’m nice like that.

Click the giant blue “this,” and then scroll down until you see the “Feed” option, and click it.

On the next screen, choose the first option, “New feed item.”

The next screen will ask you for the feed URL for the blog you want to share. This is not the blog URL, but the feed URL. If you don’t know the feed URL already, visit the blog you want to share. They likely have an RSS button on their homepage, and you can copy the link address. The feed URL should look like “http://feeds.feedburner.com/nameofblog” or “http://www.nameofblog.com/feed.”

Put the feed URL into the field and click “Create Trigger.” I’m using my girl Kate‘s blog feed as an example.

You’re halfway there! Notice on the next screen how the giant blue “this” has turned into the trigger you just chose. We just told IFTTT that we want it to do something every time our friend publishes a new post to their feed. Now we have to tell IFTTT what that something is, so click the giant blue “that.”

Now you get to choose your second network. I want to share her posts to Twitter, so I will scroll down and select the Twitter icon:

If this is your first time using Twitter with IFTTT, you’ll go through a quick authorization process, but you only have to do it once.

Now you have to tell Twitter what to do. There are several options, but for this example, you want to choose the first option, “Post a tweet.”

Almost done! First we get to configure the automatic tweet that is going to go out every time this recipe is triggered (when your friend publishes a blog post). The field automatically populates with “{{EntryTitle}} and {{EntryUrl}} which will be your friend’s blog post title and link. You can see below that I added text that I wanted each of these tweets to begin with, tagging my friend in the process:

Click “create action,” and the next screen will show you the recipe you created. If all looks good, click “create recipe.”

From there you’ll be taken back to your dashboard which lists all of your recipes. You can turn them on and off, test them, delete them, and edit them from here.

And that’s it! Just repeat the process for any other blogs you want to share, and sit back and enjoy the fact that your Twitter feed will be more active, and your friends will love you for sharing their content.

I hope you enjoyed this time-saving tip. If you have any great ideas for an IFTTT recipe, I want to hear them, so leave them in a comment!