A Twitter, Instagram workaround to help you post photos fast

by Pat Lemieux

If you are anything like me you want all your social media platforms to get along. You want your Facebook to talk to your Twitter for events, your Pinterest to share pins on Twitter and you want your Instagram photos to show up everywhere.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. At some point in 2012 Instagram and Twitter stopped playing nice together and your beautiful photos began only showing up as links in your Twitter feed. I don’t know about you but I began to see less interaction and interest immediately.

You are a small business; you should be taking photos, making them look beautiful with filters on Instagram and then sharing them across all your social media channels so that your customers see them and engage with you more.

Instagram works just fine with its parent company, Facebook, but with Facebook’s news feed algorithm there is no guarantee your image will be seen. Since Twitter doesn’t filter what your followers see, you stand a good chance of having your image noticed thanks to the changes they have made this year to better showcase images, thus increasing the eyes on your latest image.

In short, you want your Instagram images to appear on Twitter too.

There is an easy workaround for this. Check out If This Then That. Essentially IFTTT is a way to make connections between different apps that can save you time and keep you informed. Read their About page and quickly you will understand how to make a recipe that sets helpful “triggers” for you on your different social media channels.

So, there are just a few steps you need to take (that will take a total of 5 minutes) and you will soon have your Instagram photos being shared on your Twitter feed for all your followers to see.

1. Create an IFTTT account
2. Give permission for IFTTT to access both your Twitter and Instagram accounts
3. Use this recipe
4. Post pictures to your Instagram like normal

What you will find is that when you share your Instagram photos on Twitter they will go from looking like this:

 To something that looks more like this:

 

Which makes everyone happy.

It is a really great way to get images of your lunch specials, beer specials, new clothing lines, recent construction project, new lobster traps … you name it.

As a business owner with a smartphone there is no reason you can’t be promoting your business to your entire online audience, in just a few short minutes a day.

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