Share a post on several social media platforms with IFTTT

In my spare time I'm drawing cartoons. After finishing one, I want to publish them on several social media platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter

On every platform I have a personal profile where I publish everything and a profile for cartoons related to developer topics.

My workflow currently is:

• Publish the post at the KackDev Instagram account
• Publish the same at the KackDev Twitter account
• Publish the same at the KackDev Facebook page
• Repost the twitter post to my twitter account
• Repost it in my story at my private Instagram account
• Publish the post at my private Instagram account
• Publish the post at my private Facebook profile

Wow! Many steps that has to be done manually before I can annoy everyone with my bad drawings!

I was asking myself if this can't be automated. Of course this is possible to some degree. I do not know if this can be done more efficient. Let me know!

IFTTT

If this than that is a service where you can define workflows based upon start actions. E.g. "if I receive an email from xxx then send one to yyyy" and stuff like that.

It also provides Twitter, Instagram and Facebook integration. And it is free!

Accounts

IFTTT allows only one Twitter/Instagram/Facebook connection per IFTTT account. As we want to control two social media profiles per platform, we need two IFTTT accounts. In this blog post I use the term private IFTTT account for that one that is connected to my private social media profiles. Accordingly I call my account that is linked to my KackDev social media profiles KackDev IFTTT account.

Publishing to KackDev@Instagram

I use Planoly for this task. But it is not required. Planoly allows me in the free tier to maintain one Instagram account and to create many hashtag sets. The later is the reason why I fall back on a third party tool. I do not want to search the hashtags manually all the time I make a post.

Publishing to KackDev@Twitter

Now I need a Instagram <-> Twitter integration in my KackDev IFTTT account. Luckily someone has published such an applet at IFTTT.

Small IFTTT excurse

If you are new to IFTTT, your start screen will look like this:

Klick onto the magnifying glass at the top and type in "twitter". You will see many results.

We are interested in the second applet "Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter". Click onto it. Press the big "Connect" Toggle. Now IFTTT will redirect you to Instagram which will ask you to authorize IFTTT. In my case I link my KackDev Instagram account with my KackDev IFTTT account. Now You will be redirected to IFTTT which then redirects you to Twitter. Here I link my KackDev Twitter account.

If you see following screen, everything works as expected:

Finishing the integration

Well, nothing more has to be done. I have activated the applet, linked both social media accounts to my KackDev IFTTT account.

Publish to KackDev@Facebook page

This one is easy. I go to my KackDev IFTTT account and search for "Facebook":

Click onto the applet "Post your Instagram photos to a Facebook page". Again IFTTT asks you to authenticate - this time against Facebook. In the next step you select the Facebook page.

Sharing the post in your private social media profiles

What you have until now:

• Create one post at Instagram
• automatically create a tweet
• automatically create a post in your Facebook page

Following steps are missing, yet:

• Repost the twitter post
• Repost the Instagram in my private Instagram story
• Publish the post at my private Instagram account
• Publish the post at Facebook

Repost the tweet in my @JosefBiehler twitter account

This is a bit more tricky. Twitter does not allow to define an applet that can retweet tweets of specific user. This can be solved by several ways. I prefer to write a small microservice that is triggered by IFTTT. You have to create or reuse existing tokens of your twitter developer account.

const Twitter = require("twitter-lite");
const express = require("express");
require("./envvars");

function retweet(id, TWTR_CKEY, TWTR_CSECRET, TWTR_ATOKEN, TWTR_ASECRET) {
    const client = new Twitter({
        subdomain: "api",
        consumer_key: TWTR_CKEY,
        consumer_secret: TWTR_CSECRET,
        access_token_key: TWTR_ATOKEN,
        access_token_secret: TWTR_ASECRET
    });

    return client.post("statuses/retweet/" + id);
}

var app = express();
app.get("/", async (req, res) => {
    console.log("new request");
    const link = req.query.link;
    console.log("link: " + link);
    const id = link.match(/.*\/([0-9]{6,})/)[1];
    console.log("id: " + id);

    const secret = req.query.secret.trim();

    if (process.env.SECRET.indexOf(secret) <= -1) {
        console.log("wrong secret");
        res.sendStatus(401);
        return;
    }

    try {
        const result = await retweet(id, process.env.TWTR_CKEY, process.env.TWTR_CSECRET, process.env.TWTR_ATOKEN, process.env.TWTR_ASECRET);
        res.sendStatus(200);
    } catch(e) {
        console.log(JSON.stringify(e))
        res.sendStatus(500);
    }
});

app.listen(44320, () => console.log("listening on port 44320"));

The service is quite simple. It just accepts a GET request, containing the Tweeturl and a secret key as query parameter. From the URL the tweet ID is extracted and used to send the retweet request. Log in into your private IFTTT account, go to platform.ifttt.com and find the button to create a new applet:

Note: Users in the free tier on IFTTT can create applets for free but they can not publish them to other users.

Create an applet with Twitter as Trigger and a Webhook as Action:

As value for the URL field in the webhook, you choose something like that:
http://link-to-your-service/?link={{LinkToTweet}}&secret=a_secret

After saving it, you can view it in your private IFTTT account by clicking this icon:

If you click onto it, you are redirected to IFTTT and you can connect that applet to your account. During this process you will have to connect your private twitter profile with your IFTTT account if you haven't done that yet.

Result:

From now on every tweet from @KackDev is retweeted to my private twitter account.

Reposting the post to my private FB & Instagram account

Well, due to breaking changes in the Facebook & Instagram API, no one is able to post to private FB and Instagram accounts anymore. That means I have to post it to my private Instagram account manually. Also the post on the Facebook page must be reposted manually.

If you have an idea how this can be solved, let me know :-)

Summary

I showed you how I utilize IFTTT to spread a post at my business Instagram account to other platforms. This reduces the effort for maintaining social media accounts. Also you may got an idea what is possible with IFTTT.

Found a typo?

As I am not a native English speaker, it is very likely that you will find an error. In this case, feel free to create a pull request here: https://github.com/gabbersepp/dev.to-posts . Also please open a PR for all other kind of errors.

Do not worry about merge conflicts. I will resolve them on my own.