Managing a Social Media Contest with IFTTT, Slack and Flipboard

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Managing a Social Media Contest with IFTTT, Slack and Flipboard

It’s hard to keep up with all the monitoring and automation tools out there! My job as a social media strategist requires that I manage content, keep track of all my accounts and be everyone’s eyes and ears. That being said, I am always looking for quick and easy ways to manage large amounts of data. I am excited to share this discovery with you all.

We were commissioned to run a contest/sweepstakes via Facebook and Instagram. The contest involved a vegan cheese launch and we asked followers to cook something then share on any of the above social channels to win a grand prize. It’s simple enough, no? Well, think again.

How do you…

  • Display all those delicious images?
  • Organize them in a fashion that is easy for the client to view?
  • Pick the winners?
  • Showcase the winners and give them credit?

Just sharing links was not enough. We wanted everything to be in one place so we can compare recipes and pictures and select the top images with ease.

So here is the formula:

Meet IFTTT.

You have probably heard this name kicked around in the social media circles. It means “If This, Then That.” In other words, if an action is taken something will ensue. It’s kind of like “digital physics” – for every action, there’s a (digital) reaction! A simple example would be: If you set an egg timer on for four minutes the alarm will go off once the time is up.

To get IFTTT to work you must create a “recipe” not as in a cooking recipe, (yes this got me interested at first, I thought it was about food) but as in an automation recipe. So I created two simple recipes:

The first one was to pull images from Instagram, the second from Facebook once somebody posts. It sure beats doing eternal searches for the hashtag. I asked IFTTT to search for the #cookingwithmiyoko hashtag on Instagram, Facebook and “THEN” add to a Slack channel (I’ll get into this further down) that I created with the hashtag name. See image below.

IFTTT Recipes

IFTTT gives you the option to create your recipes. See in the descriptions in the image above. It also supports Slack. Once the groundwork is all done, the channel is populated with the images from either social network.

Slack Is NO “Slacker”

Slack is a powerful environment for teamwork. It allows you to upload files from cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox, organize projects and workflow or simply have a conversation with your teammates. In addition it also allows you to create channels and add RSS or IFTTT feeds.

Once you have an account on Slack you can now organize your channels with team members.

Case in point, this example where you are working on a social media event and there are several moving parts with many team members involved.

The image below shows how to create a channel that will house the feeds created from the hashtag as shown in the picture on the far left.

Now we are ready to put all of our links in a visible, shareable space.

Slack Channels

Flipping the Feed into a Flipboard Magazine.

Showing 100 links to our client was not an option, they wanted to be able to see each image, evaluate the presentation and creativity. So the best tool to translate these images into a portable stylized recipe book is the Flipboard app.

We started by clicking the links in the Slack channel to access. Then, using the Flipboard icon we added all the entries into a magazine. See below.

Flipping into a Flipboard magazine

Here is a sample of the magazine. The sweepstakes winner’s picture is now gracing the cover. This gave us a nice visual looking magazine with all the submissions in one place. Not only is it inspiring to look through but, it is also shareable, portable and the contestants really enjoyed seeing their masterpieces in a publication.

Final Magazine

So try your hand at this and let me know how it worked out. Let me know if you have any questions. @websuccess

9 comments

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    April 15th, 2016 11:25  / 

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