Automatically Share Tweets Using IFTTT

Last week I wrote about using IFTTT, the webservice that automates conversation among various other web applications, to automatically aggregate posts from multiple blogs.

Today I will discussion using IFTTT to automatically pass on news through Twitter. This recipe will monitor one Twitter feed and retweet any new posts that are published there. You can also configure thie recipe to only retweet posts with particular keywords in them.

Why might you want to automate retweeting? I can think of three possibilities—though there are likely more—

1. You have a Twitter account for a course and you want to retweet things posted there through your personal account.
2. You’re following and sharing a particular hashtag on Twitter and want to ensure you don’t miss any relevant tweets.
3. There’s an institutional account (or an account associated with a particular project) that you want to promote. This is how I use this recipe. I like to automatically pass on tweets from the main Profhacker account. I used to do this manually, checking the account several times each day. Now I let IFTTT handle that promotion so that, even if I miss one of my colleague’s posts, I can still promote it through my Twitter account.

I should note that I only use IFTTT to make easier a task I was manaully performing each day. Overusing these sorts of recipes would quickly clog a Twitter feed with junk, and I don’t recommend automating too many retweets.

You can find my @ProfHacker –> @ryancordell Twitter recipe here. do you do anything to automatically post announcements, updates, or the like through Twitter? Tell us about what you do in the comments.