Reddit as source for a COPE strategy, and IFTTT for all the rest

IFTTT Reddit to SlackAfter the first CLSxItaly, we added to the Slack a new channel to share interesting community management resources, like blogposts etc. It was good, because allowed us to continue the discussion with interesting ideas, mainly thanks to the tireless work of Alessio.

But I felt we were missing something, like a broader sense of sharing with other community managers outside the Slack, that could be interested to same links too. Or an easy way to browse and search thru the different resources posted. Or a way to maintain the discussion visually connected with the different links posted, instead of a long stream of messages.

I remembered that, in the old days, a dedicated service was created for link sharing and discussion, a service that has survived to the present days: Reddit. Don’t know about it? You should! Reddit looked to me the perfect place to post our resources, and turns out that a subreddit dedicated to community management already exists: r/CommunityManager.

Great! But neither I could ask to all the CLSxItaly member to migrate from Slack to Reddit, nor force a double post on Slack and Reddit. Thankfully, IFTTT came again in handy, with channels for Reddit and Slack, plus others, so I was able to quickly implement a C.O.P.E. (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) strategy, using Reddit as source and then publishing the same content on the Slack content-sharing channel, Twitter and, potentially, many more. It also satisfy different kind of users with different kind of social feeds or tools habits (I, for example, still prefer RSS feeds aggregated by a reader).

I created a new IFTTT recipe using Reddit channel for the “this” part and selecting the “Any new post in subreddit” trigger, using “CommunityManager” as parameter.

IFTTT Reddit channel

For the “then” part, instead, I used the Slack channel with the “Post to channel” action.

IFTTT Slack channel

Too easy. Now, every time someone post a link in the r/CommunityManager, the Slack channel get a message (with a delay of some minutes). Is not that cool and complete as posting a link on Slack (with image, content snippet etc), but it works well.

Finally, I did another recipe to post the same link on Twitter, to be really COPE ;)

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