3-plus IFTTT ‘bots’ to increase your small business productivity
Tech leaders are telling is that just about everyone will be replaced by a bot or artificial intelligence soon, so let’s start leveraging this power ourselves before it’s too late.
One of the most powerful (and free) automation services available to us is If This, Then That – IFTTT.com.
Trying to get started can be a little overwhelming, so I’ve picked three free “off-the-shelf” IFTTT apps that will come in handy for many small business owners. They are easy to use and will help build your confidence and understanding in the various ways the system can work for you.
Scheduling
Todoist is one of the most highly rated to-do list apps available today. Many small business owners depend on it. At the same time, many use Google calendar. While both of these have their specific functions, it would be nice if they could work together a bit better.
There’s a good IFTTT app that automatically creates a Google calendar event for every new Todoist task. Todoist is extremely handy on your mobile devices while Google Calendar, I believe, truly excels on your laptop or desktop. If you use this app, you can get a complete overview of your daily obligations when you check your Google calendar.
By the way, an app that does the reverse – creates an Todoist task when a Google Calendar event is created – is available as well.
Follow a hashtag
Are you trying to achieve total global domination on Twitter over one or more social media hashtags? To do this, you have to keep track of all the tweets containing the hashtag(s) you’re interested in. This also helps you discover others who are operating in your “space.”
There’s a very good app that will create a Google spreadsheet entry every time a tweet with a specific hashtag is posted on Twitter. It’s much easier to analyze these tweets on a spreadsheet than it is to do a manual hashtag search on your browser. For instance, you can sort by Twitter handle to see who is doing the most posting.
This is also very handy for finding good content to retweet.
Turn your wi-fi reception off…or on
I sometimes get frustrated when I’m out running errands – my smart phone starts acting dumb because it can’t find or settle on a wi-fi network to use. It’s constantly asking me if I want to join this or that network, or it just gets hung up. This app will send you a notification reminding you to turn off your wi-fi whenever you leave a specific location. And this one will remind you to turn it back on!
The first step in any project is always the most difficult to take. I hope that by adopting one of these IFTTT apps you’ll become more familiar with the system and confident that you can make it work for you.
Let us know which IFTTT apps have proved to be the most valuable for you.