In order to follow this tutorial and set up your own automated Twitter recipe, you will need the following tools: [LIST] [*]IFTTT account: When you create an account with IFTTT, make sure you provide them your email address so they can send notifications (you don’t want that!). [/LIST]
There are 2 ways of creating recipes on IFTTT: 1) manually by going to their website or app and writing the code yourself; or 2) automatically by using existing “recipes” as a base for your custom ones. For purposes of this blog post, we’re interested in the latter, so we can just use recipes as a template. Therefore, you will need to access IFTTT through your web browser or mobile device. Twitter account: Do this if you don’t already have one! You do not need a business account; any personal Twitter profile with email set up for notifications will do. Upon signup, you’ll be prompted by IFTTT to connect it – type in your username and password and allow access for IFTTT to view your tweets. WordPress blog with active publishing schedule: This is important because the IFTTT recipe that we’re about to make will share new blog posts on Twitter automatically when published, but only if they are on a live site. If you do not have a blog, create one or make sure your existing blog is configured to show published posts on the front page – this way it is possible for IFTTT to notice when new posts are up and share them automatically.
Optional : You may want to consider using Google Analytics , so that you can track how well the Twitter shares perform in regard to number of visits/pageviews/etc. It’s also good to note that if you’re having trouble getting this particular recipe set up properly, there are many other websites and blogs out there that have done it before. Just search “Pinterest Tumblr WordPress” (or whatever sites you use) on Google and you’ll get tons of results.
From here on out, I’ll assume you have all the pre-requisites ready to go and we can continue with actually setting up the Twitter recipe.
Creating The Recipe:
To set this up, go to IFTTT through your browser and log in (if you aren’t already logged in). Then look at the main page of IFTTT – it should pop up like a dashboard similar to this one:
Click on “My Recipes” on the right hand side and then click “Create a Recipe”. This will bring you to another screen asking for details about what we’re making – let’s start by naming it! It should be obvious why we want to call it "Twitter Posts on Tumblr/Pinterest/etc. ", so enter that name in the “Give your Recipe a Name” field and click on “Create Trigger”. This will move you to a new screen with another form:
The most important part of this form is selecting when notifications should be sent – select “as soon as possible”, because we don’t want Twitter posts to go out hours after they’ve been published. So set it up like this, then scroll down to the bottom and click “Create Action”. On this next page, there are more options for our recipe – but first we need to get our Dropbox API key (we’ll use it later). To do this, click on “Dropbox” from the list of services at the left sidebar and choose “Generate an Access Token” on the page that appears. This will open a new window for your Dropbox account – enter your password and click “Generate Key”. I recommend saving this key in a separate tab or document, just so you can keep it handy.
Now go back to the recipe creation page (you likely have to click on the “back” arrow at the top left). Make sure you’re still logged into Dropbox, then input your API key in the required field and click on “Connect”. Back on our recipe configuration form, some of these options should now be filled out by themselves automatically; if not, fill them out yourself and make sure all other fields are valid too:
Click “Create Action” after filling out everything properly. On one last screen, you’ll be able to get IFTTT to send a test notification (which is good if you want to check that everything works as expected – this option may not appear depending on which services you used). When done testing if needed, click “Finish” and the recipe will finish setting up.