As marketers, we all face the same challenge: how do we stay on top of the news and trends that matter to our industry?
Our inboxes are overflowing. Our Twitter feeds never stop scrolling. Our bookmarks folder is stuffed to capacity. And yet, more than ever, our clients and coworkers depend on us to bring order to the chaos.
The more informed we are, the more invaluable and influential we become -- always ready with the statistic that makes the deck, the perfect quote from an industry insider, or a genius idea for a new partnership.
The good news? You don’t have to possess some kind of superpower to stay on top of it all. A well-organized system can help you rise to the challenge, and it’s a system anyone can implement with a little help from IFTTT: a handy tool that empowers you to make connections between services and devices you already use (and can help you discover new ones).
These services are called Channels (think: Facebook, Evernote, Gmail, etc.) and users can connect them with simple and powerful “if this, then that” statements called Recipes. Recipes can save you time, automate your life, and, yes, keep you informed and up-to-date on everything you need to know.
To help you get started, we pulled together 35 Recipes organized along five themes. Pick and choose the ones that matter most to you to create a custom system that’ll keep you informed and influential, automatically.
How to Stay on Top of Industry News & Trends: 35 Simple IFTTT Hacks to Try
Catch up on news in one place, at a time that's convenient for you with these Recipes ...
Unfortunately, the number of browser tabs you have open doesn’t correlate to how well you understand your industry. In fact, it can make it hard to actually get work done. Then, instead of finding and reading everything you saw in various places during the day, you’re stuck finishing the tasks you should have done at work.
Find your focus with these Recipes: they’ll help you quickly save interesting articles and content you come across during your day, and send them all to the service of your choice. All the news you need, in one place, ready when you are.
1) Take the first link from any tweets you Like and save it to your Pocket account.
2) Send pages from Instapaper to your Kindle via Gmail by moving them to a specific folder.
3) Create a note in Evernote whenever you save a post in Reddit.
4) Save an article for later in Feedly to automatically save it in Pocket.
5) Star an email in Gmail to automatically save it in an Evernote notebook.
6) Add an article to your Pocket queue to automatically post the title and URL to a Slack channel.
If that’s still too many steps, there are also Recipes that’ll curate a “Read later” list for you based on the topics and mediums you choose. No clicking required: just log in at the end of the day to see what’s been collected.
Think of these as a way to go beyond the Google alert and stay on top of the sources and topics that matter most to your industry.
7) Moves the top posts from r/worldnews to your Pocket account.
Pro tip: Hit “Advanced settings" to put in whatever subreddit you’d like to monitor.
8) Get a daily email update with the top posts from your favorite Reddit subreddit.
9) Save the day's most Dugg story from Digg to your Instapaper.
10) Get an email whenever Digg publishes a new story featuring a specific keyword.
11) Save stories from a specific section of Time to read later on Pocket.
12) Get an email digest of the week's most popular Business Day articles from The New York Times.
Tap the global water cooler to stay on top of cultural trends and insights with these Recipes ...
You may roll your eyes when you hear about “The Dress” or “Chewbacca mom,” but the fact is that these online sensations become cultural touchpoints.
Today’s viral moment is tomorrow’s brand strategy, marketing idea, sponsorship, or even just a dinner conversation with an important client. These Recipes will help you set up alerts so that breaking news and trends come straight to you as they gain momentum.
13) Get an email from The New York Times whenever there is breaking technology news.
Pro tip: Technology not your thing? Hit "Advanced settings" to change which section of the newspaper you want alerts from.
14) Get an email when content gets more than 1K shares an hour on social media from Time.com.
15) Get an email with the most Dugg video on Digg every day.
16) Get a daily email digest with the top headlines from NPR.
And of course, because nothing on the internet counts until it’s a GIF, there’s a Recipe for staying on top of those, too:
17) Get a daily email with the GIFs that are trending on Giphy.
Keep your team up to date with these Recipes ...
Chances are, you’re not the only one who could benefit from a steady stream of curated info. Connect different services to communication tools, such as Slack, to keep your coworkers and collaborators as in-the-know as you are. Setting up Recipes like these is a simple way to show your value as a knowledge worker and make yourself indispensable to your team.
18) Share popular articles from The New York Times with your LinkedIn followers.
19) Send live updates from Twitter to a Slack channel.
20) Send an article to a Slack channel when you tag it with a specific tag in Pocket.
21) Post your Feedly 'save for later' articles to a Slack channel.
22) Post Instapaper articles to a Slack channel once they're moved into a folder.
Find influencers and keep an eye on the competition by tracking Twitter with these Recipes ...
Half the battle is finding the right sources. With so much noise out there, how do you keep track of who’s talking about your industry in a meaningful way? Especially when so much of the chatter happens in real time, on social media. These Recipes can help you create groups you can easily monitor and siphon off relevant searches into other services where you can organize and interpret them at your leisure.
23) Add users to a Twitter list when they use a specific hashtag.
24) Add the user to a Twitter list when you Like a tweet.
25) Add a tweet to a Google spreadsheet when it contains a specific hashtag.
26) Get an email whenever a specific user tweets.
Pro tip: You can email up to five email accounts with a Recipe like this.
27) Create a search on Twitter and get a daily email with the results.
Pro tip: Hit “advanced settings” to change the search term.
28) Add users to a Twitter list when they tweet in a specific area.
Share your informed POV with your social networks with these Recipes ...
Now that you’re on top of everything, you can start to build a reputation as an informed thought leader. Curate a steady stream of articles and insights that you’ve given the stamp of approval across your social media. It’ll help you build your online influence.
29) Automatically tweet your Diggs.
30) Automatically tweet articles when you tag them with a specific tag in Feedly.
31) Post your Pocket favorites to Facebook.
32) Automatically share articles you tag in Pocket with a specific tag with your LinkedIn followers.
33) Automatically share articles with your LinkedIn network when you give them a specific tag in Feedly.
34) Add a specific hashtag to a tweet to automatically post it as a LinkedIn status update.
(This is a great solution if you don’t want everything you tweet added to your LinkedIn profile.)
35) Automatically share an Inoreader article on your LinkedIn by broadcasting it.
Interested in exploring more Recipes? IFTTT's collection for marketers is the perfect next step. Learn how to seamlessly cross-post, organize files, manage tasks and campaigns, and much more.
What are your best tips and tricks for staying on top of industry trends? Share them in the comments.
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