Saturday, April 25, 2015

This One Secret Will Let You Post From Instagram to Twitter – The Right Way

If you’re an avid Instagrammer, you have no doubt run into some frustrations when attempting to share your photos on Twitter. While it’s technically possible to automatically tweet every picture you upload to Instagram, it’s not all that pretty – the tweet will only include a link to your post on Instagram, not the photo itself.

In 2012, Instagram discontinued support for Twitter Cards technology, effectively cutting of Twitter users from sharing Instagram photos. Since then, marketers have struggled with workarounds, double postings, and inefficient methods for sharing the photos they upload to Instagram on Twitter.

Including photos in tweets can generate up to 35 percent more retweets and 18 percent more clicks, so you’re missing out on a good chunk of engagement if you’re not sharing photos.

And it can be quite time-consuming to snap a photo, share it via Instagram, and then open Twitter to write and send a separate post. This will, of course, ensure that the full photo is shared on both networks, but it doubles your workload.

But there is a method that will bypass this extra work, and allow you to post full-size images from Instagram to Twitter.

This method requires a simple setup, and then works seamlessly in the background. When implemented, it will automatically share every photo you upload to Instagram on Twitter, as a full photo that will appear in your audience’s timeline – not as an easy-to-miss URL.

The secret behind this too-good-to-be-true tool? If This Then That.

If This Then That, or IFTTT, is a service that creates if-then statements for the web. Called “Recipes”, these statements essentially create an action based on a trigger.

The recipe in question for posting Instagram photos to Twitter can be found here.

To use this recipe, you’ll have to create an IFTTT account, and then connect both your Instagram and Twitter accounts. Once this is done, it’s a simple matter of turning the recipe on and watching the magic happen.

The trigger in this recipe is “posting a new photo to Instagram” and the action is “post the photo and caption to Twitter.” This means that, once it’s turned on, the recipe will work in the background to automatically post every single photo you share on Instagram to Twitter – in its entirety. No more ugly URLs linking to Instagram.

Just under 100,000 people are currently using this recipe, which makes it one of the most popular recipes on the entire site.

The beauty of this solution is that, once it is set up, you never have to think about the issue again. Every time you post a photo to Instagram, that same photo will be posted to Twitter. And, if in the future you will be posting content to Instagram that you do not want posted to Twitter, it’s just one click to turn the recipe off.

(Selfie image via Shutterstock)

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