Tweet from Google Calendar (because it's awesome)

I have been playing around with http://ifttt.com for a while now, but I hadn’t used all that many of their channels (their inputs and outputs for creating amazing workflows). Today, I found one that I REALLY like.

Imagine this:

You are managing a Twitter account with a bunch of different people, whether they are all a part of an event team or the same organization. You have run into three distinct problems in managing this twitter account:

1. People tweet overtop of one another, meaning that there are periods of time in which there are a lot of tweets bunched up on one another.
2. People tweet when it is convenient for them rather than when the tweets will actually be seen and consumed by real people.
3. There are long stretches when there are no tweets. No one is really sure who should be handling the twitter account right now, but no one has tweeted for a few days and it becomes clear that no one is taking ownership for the account.

While there are a bunch of highly useful but overly complex tools to manage these three problems, I think that IFTTT does a much better job of making this task easy and putting it into a workflow that is already in existance.

Do this:

1. Create a new Google Calendar called something like “Our Twitter Calendar”
2. Share that calendar with everyone who is managing the twitter account.
3. Have one person use this IFTTT recipe to connect their Google Calendar to the twitter account.

Note: you should change the hashtag that you would like to use to trigger the tweets to something that you would like to use rather than the #LiC that I have in there now.

Once you have set this up, anyone who adds an event to the calendar with the hashtag you have chosen will automatically trigger a Tweet within 15 minutes of the calendar event. That means that you can set up a schedule of tweets months into the future. You can put events on the calendar and have them tweeted out. You can make sure there are no long gaps between tweets. You can make sure that no one is “tweeting on top of one another”. You can also make sure that everyone can tweet without leaving what they are already doing and logging in to twiter or pulling up their applications. You could even schedule tweets from your phone or anywhere else you have access to your calendar.

While this may not seem like a giant leap forward for mankind, I believe that it solves a bunch of problems that organizations have with maintaining their Twitter accounts and updating them with important information in a timely manner.