UPDATE: Thanks to the new Twitter API rules IFTTT is now dead when it comes to this. BOO Twitter.

FINALLY! Yes FINALLY! after months of waiting for a good solution to do this something has, again, FINALLY! found it’s way online. Essentially what this little process will let you do is automatically sync what you post on Google+ to Twitter and then have Twitter sync to Facebook. It’s a “set it and forget it” solution as well thanks to a service called iftt (If This Then That).

Here’s what you need to get it rolling:

Google+ Account

Facebook Account

Twitter Account

plus2atom

ifft Account

First thing you’ll want to do is head over to ifft and sign up for an account. Ifttt is a nifty little service that runs in the background on the internet and it automates tasks based on rules/triggers that you set. It doesn’t require you to download any software or the like–it simply requires authorization to your accounts. It’s nothing to worry about though, they’ve been around for a little while now and I have had my eye on them. As far as I can tell they are totally legit.

Once you sign up for ifttt the first thing you’ll want to do is head over to the Dashboard and select Get More Channels:

Next you’ll want to scroll down till you see Facebook and click it!

When prompted you’ll see a giant Activate button, select this. It’ll take you to the Facebook authorization screen.

I’m honestly not going to take a picture of the Facebook process because as far as I know they’ll change it 2-3 times before I finish this post, but whatever it is at the time of reading just hit Allow, Login with Facebook or “Some other Facebook Words“.

Once you’ve successfully activated/authorized/etc Facebook to your ifttt account you’ll see the following screen–this means success!

Next you’ll want to go back to that Channels screen, but this time you’ll want to select Twitter.

Once inside the Twitter screen repeat the same process as previously by clicking the Authorize button and then when redirected to Twitter follow whatever their latest and greatest steps are for giving a 3rd party service access to your account. If you’ve done it right you’ll see a screen like the following (similar to the Facebook) that will list your Twitter account name.

Now that you’ve got the social networks all ready to roll we need to active one last channel to connect Google+ and that’s the RSS Feed option. We are activating this because for this magic to happen we are actually using a third party service called plus2atom, which converts your Google+ posts to an RSS feed that can be processed and posted out to the other networks. It seems a little sloppy, but it works. Hopefully one day we will see a nice and clean API on Google+ so we don’t have to send all of our data through these random services hands.

So once again go back to that Channels screen and locate RSS Feed:

On the next screen simply hit Activate–no special steps for this one just yet. It should simply turn on.

After you’ve got it activated head back to the top blue bar of ifttt and locate Tasks and select it, this is where we will actually create the rules that process all of this.

Once in the tasks menu select the big blue button that says Create New Task.

Now it’s very important that you follow the next set of instructions pretty close, in order for the 3 networks to be in sync it has to be done in a specific order. It must follow this path Google+ > Twitter > Facebook, otherwise it won’t work. Example being Google+ > Facebook > Twitter is a no go at the time of writing.(at least for me) Google+ must also be the parent network–you’ll have to do all of your posting there.

For the first task select the giant This button

and then select Twitter. After selecting Twitter you’ll be brought to yet another list of options. You’ll want to select the New tweet by you option for this task.

On the next screen you’ll be asked to include @replies and mentions–I suggest not doing this since it’ll sync your Twitter conversations to Facebook where they won’t really make that much sense on that network since the users can’t actually click into the Twitter account you are tweeting at to figure out who they are–so it’s more or less spammy.

Just click Create Trigger to move on.

Next you’ll want to select the blue That button and then select Facebook and set the event to Create a status message.

On the next step you’ll see a box to enter in custom text–just ignore this and select Create Action. After this you’ll be brought to a page to review what you’ve done. It should say something like “If new tweet by @zackeryfretty then create a status message on Zackery Fretty’s news feed”–as shown below.

If this is what you are seeing you are all set with this part, hit Create Task.

Now it’s time to create the next task, which will be the task that connects Google+ to Twitter. To accomplish this return to the Tasks > Create Task screen. At this point in the tutorial I will stop posting so many images, since you’ve already done this before I’ll keep those to a limit. I figure you know what you are doing on ifttt by now.

This time around we will be using RSS Feed as the This function, so select that.

After selecting RSS Feed you’ll want to set the trigger to New feed item as shown below:

Now here is where plus2atom steps in, almost seamlessly I might add, you’ll be prompted by ifttt to enter a Feed URL the feed URL you’ll want to process will come partly from your Google+ Profile and partly from the plus2atom service. First load your main Google+ profile and locate the ID that’s tagged in your account. It’s the number shown below:

Copy and paste that number and replace it with the xxxxxxxxx’s in the following URL:

http://macno.org/plus2atom/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Next take the plus2atom URL and add it as your Feed URL in ifttt and select Create Trigger. That’s pretty much it for the plus2atom setup–pretty simple eh? The next step is to setup the That command to Twitter by just clicking the That button and then selecting Twitter.

For the action you’ll want to select the Post a new tweet option as shown below.

Now the next step is a little up to you customization-wise, this will determine how much you want to share. The config box comes with a few wildcard calls that you can configure. If you want to simply have the Google+ post content sync you’ll just want to use the “EntryTitle” wildcard, however, if you want a snippet of the content to show and then a URL to draw people to your Google+ page you’ll want to use “EntryTitle – EntryURL“. These are just a few of the wildcards. If you take a look at the drop down at the right you can play with other options as shown below.

Once done select the Create Action button to finally move on to the last step of the process, which is basically just reviewing what you setup. It should read something along the lines of “If new feed item from x then post a new tweet to @zackeryfretty” as shown below.

If everything looks good hit the create task button and celebrate that you made it to the end of this massive tutorial for doing such a simple and more or less useless task!

Now it’s time to test it out and make sure everything is working peachy, simply create a post on Google+ and wait ~15 mins (this is the processing time on ifttt) to see your content sync from network to network.

This is just one of the automatic tasks that you can do with ifttt, the possibilities are truly endless. Who knows what they’ll come up with next?

Email > Google+ > Twitter > Facebook

Wordpress > Email > Google+ > Twitter > Facebook

Direct Pull From Brain > Text > WordPress > Email > Google+ > Twitter > Facebook