Not every business has or needs a twitter feed—but if twitter is part of your marketing mix, you most likely have automated your instagram feed to appear in your twitter timeline. This is a good strategy—you work hard to curate an interesting instagram feed so why not share that content on twitter too?
The problem is that twitter does not allow instagram images (or any 3rd party social media platform) to appear as native images. Native images are expanded in the timeline, are attractive and have higher engagement rates. Non-native images are still viewable, but they will appear as a link which forces your audience to care enough to click the link to view the image (they won’t most of the time).
Fortunately, there is a simple workaround for this problem!
How you can optimize your twitter feed to display instagram photos in all their glory
1. Open an iftt account. Iftt stands for ‘if this, then that’ and it allows you to create formulas using triggers that help to automate your social media workflow. The number of triggers are endless—you can get pretty creative here but for now, just open an account and activate your twitter and your instagram channels.
2. Browse recipes on iftt for ‘instagram to twitter’ and select one that allows pictures to appear as native twitter images. Then, install the recipe. Try this one!
3. Test out your new recipe by uploading an image to instagram and seeing if it appears the way you want it in your twitter feed; this can take a couple of minutes to happen, so don’t worry if it’s not instantaneous. If you are in the habit of sharing your instagram pictures to twitter within the app, you can skip that now!
Having a twitter feed that is as attractive as possible is so easy that i am continually surprised by brands that fail to do this—there is no excuse to be so sloppy! If you are going to bother having a feed, at least make it the best it can be.
Ps- images that are loaded and later deleted to instagram remain in your twitter feed. Personally, i like this feature and use it intentionally to ensure that content on twitter is in fact distinct from what i offer on instagram—which I tend to edit frequently anyway.
The problem is that twitter does not allow instagram images (or any 3rd party social media platform) to appear as native images. Native images are expanded in the timeline, are attractive and have higher engagement rates. Non-native images are still viewable, but they will appear as a link which forces your audience to care enough to click the link to view the image (they won’t most of the time).
Fortunately, there is a simple workaround for this problem!
How you can optimize your twitter feed to display instagram photos in all their glory
1. Open an iftt account. Iftt stands for ‘if this, then that’ and it allows you to create formulas using triggers that help to automate your social media workflow. The number of triggers are endless—you can get pretty creative here but for now, just open an account and activate your twitter and your instagram channels.
2. Browse recipes on iftt for ‘instagram to twitter’ and select one that allows pictures to appear as native twitter images. Then, install the recipe. Try this one!
3. Test out your new recipe by uploading an image to instagram and seeing if it appears the way you want it in your twitter feed; this can take a couple of minutes to happen, so don’t worry if it’s not instantaneous. If you are in the habit of sharing your instagram pictures to twitter within the app, you can skip that now!
Having a twitter feed that is as attractive as possible is so easy that i am continually surprised by brands that fail to do this—there is no excuse to be so sloppy! If you are going to bother having a feed, at least make it the best it can be.
Ps- images that are loaded and later deleted to instagram remain in your twitter feed. Personally, i like this feature and use it intentionally to ensure that content on twitter is in fact distinct from what i offer on instagram—which I tend to edit frequently anyway.
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