Zapier and IFTTT are prime examples of a new class of clever software that allow your apps, programs, social media to “talk” to each behind the scenes. This is commonly called task or app automation.
Zapier (which is more business orientated than IFTTT) describes what it does this way: “Connect the apps you use, automate tasks, get more out of your data.”
Once set up you have an automated service that works seamlessly.
Some basic examples that I use are:
Utility email invoices:
- usually they are sent 2-3 weeks before their date due, so I have them “zapped” to an Evernote notebook with a tag of “to-do”
- I put a reminder in Evernote manually (some reminders I’ll put a few days in advance)
- then a “Zap” puts them on my google calendar.
This is a very simple example – much more complex automations can be fairly easily done.
What this means for me is – I don’t forget invoices, and the zaps save me probably 5 minutes of time.
Website examples:
- Any new tweets are zapped to that website’s facebook account.
- Any new facebook posts are zapped to a blog category in the website
- Any new form submissions are zapped to a google spreadsheet (handy if you want some staff to be able to work on new form submissions and note what they have done on the spreadsheet so they don’t need access to the backend of the website
- new form submissions can also be cc’ed to another person’s email or to their Slack account or made into a new Trello job
