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Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
Keeping your Twitter followers happy is tough, especially since tweets come and go in the blink of an eye. You need to be on top of your Twitter account to grow your following, even if you’re not a social-media marketing manager or an Internet celebrity. Here’s a whole slew of IFTTT recipes you can use to track, organize and grow your tweets, followers and Internet fame.
IFTTT, or “IF This Then That,” is an automation tool that lets you set up automatic actions to be performed in one app when triggered by a separate action in a different app. IFTTT connects a variety of apps, programs and devices together so you can use any action on one app/program/device to trigger any action on another app/program/device.
Back up your feed
Twitter feeds are endless, practically unsearchable lists of 140-character snippets. The nice thing about this is that Twitter is relatively fleeting — you tweet and then 8,000 tweets later, nobody remembers the totally embarrassing thing you said — but the not-so-nice thing about this is that you will basically never be able to go back and find a specific tweet you made. Unless, of course, you back up your Twitter feed with this IFTTT recipe, which will automatically log all your tweets into a handy Google Spreadsheet. (This recipe saves your tweets in a text file in Dropbox.)
If you’d prefer to just save your favorite tweets, this IFTTT recipe will log them in Pocket, while this IFTTT recipe saves those favorites to Evernote. Looking to save other people’s tweets? Here’s an IFTTT recipe that lets you save all tweets containing a specific hashtag to a Google Spreadsheet.
Make a list
Some people use Twitter lists, others (like myself) think they’re way too hard to make and maintain. But there’s an easy way to compile a list — using IFTTT recipes, of course.
This IFTTT recipe makes a list of people whose tweets you’ve favorited, while this IFTTT recipe builds a list of people who tweet a specific hashtag (perfect for following a marketing campaign). This IFTTT recipe creates a list of people who mention you, and this IFTTT recipe adds Instagram users who post from a specific location to a list. If you’d rather your lists stay private, you can use this IFTTT recipe to make a list of new followers, which is saved to a Google Spreadsheet.
Tweet like a maniac
The key to a successful Twitter account is tweeting constantly. But sometimes you need to sleep, and there’s only so much Hootsuite scheduling you can handle. You can set up your account to automatically tweet “Good morning!” to tell your followers to have a good weekend, or to tweet a Pi-shaped pie on Pi Day.
If you create your own content (e.g., a blog), you can use this IFTTT recipe to automatically tweet any new entries to an RSS feed, or use this IFTTT recipe to tweet posts you make to your WordPress blog. You can use an IFTTT recipe to automatically tweet out anything you favorite in Pocket, or anything you upload to YouTube or add to the “watch later” list on YouTube.
Stalk people
OK, you shouldn’t actually be stalking people. But if you’re using Twitter for work, or if you’re just trying to grow your own influence in the sphere of your choice, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on influencers in your community. In other words, if you’re an aspiring celebutante reality TV star, you probably want to keep tabs on what the Kardashians are tweeting out.
Use this IFTTT recipe to get an iOS notification whenever a specific user tweets (or use this IFTTT recipe to get an Android notification when a user tweets). You can also use this IFTTT recipe to get an iOS notification whenever someone tweets in a certain area (here’s the Android version)…just in case you need to keep tabs on what’s going down in your apartment complex.
