How to Setup Automatic Social Sharing of Tours

If you or an Agent want to automatically share all tours on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest, you can use an excellent service called IFTTT to automate posting to social channels. IFTTT stands for "If This Then That", and it really works like a recipe book for the web. NOTE: You would set up individual RSS feeds for each Customer. You would have to coordinate with them on this because you will need access to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, which means you will need to do this process on THEIR IFTTT account.

Here are some example channels that IFTTT supports. You can see that it's designed with a full array of social platforms in mind, making it the perfect solution for what we're looking to accomplish. The first thing we have to do is get our data from TourBuzz, and we're going to do that in the form of an RSS feed. Each TourBuzz account set up with the Photographer's domain name is has a feed. For example https://tours.YourDomain.com/public/tour?format=rss, is an RSS feed of all tours Published in your admin account. To access this for each Customer, we will need to log into their Client Panel > Profile Settings and get the RSS feed from the link provided.

The RSS Feed button will open a new web page that may have a lot of text you don't understand. This is called XML. Ignore it. All we care about is copying the URL of the page we are now directed to so we can copy it back into IFTTT. We will want to use the IFTTT trigger associated with RSS called "Feed". This will be our input source for the workflows we are going to create.

*NOTE* - Some browsers treat RSS links differently than others. If you are prompted to choose an RSS reader when you click on the RSS Feed link or otherwise are not presented the URL and page as defined above, we recommend simply right-clicking on the link and copying it for use in the following steps.

Now that we have pasted this in the RSS feed from TourBuzz, we're ready to begin triggering actions.

You will need to have authenticated with Facebook for this next step, and given IFTTT permission to admin your Facebook Pages, and then you can post to your pages automatically.

And here you can see the Tour Link is published to the Facebook Page, with the first photo from the Tour included.

The great thing about this is that we can do the exact same process to create automatic posts to Twitter. Twitter itself is a great resource because it can be set to handle a lot of automatic tasks, like posting to Tumblr, RSS, or cross-posting to newer services like App.net or even Facebook. Twitter is also a very lightweight social network, with great re-sharing capabilities, so if you have a strong community of viewers who follow you, you can easily get more eyes on your content this way.

You can also look here for more updated info: IFTTT.com - Social-Media-Collection

*NOTE* - IFTT may have changed since the creation of this video. We cannot guarantee 100% accuracy of interface, or steps.