There are a lot of interesting ways in which you can use our monitoring services. Engaging in online reputation management is also one of them. A main prerequisite for establishing a good name for you and your business is being transparent. But let's face it, eventually your website will experience downtime. It happens even to the best of sites. And more often than not it is your responsibility keep track of the performance and availability of your website, and take proper action when needed.

In the unfortunate event of your website going down, for one reason or another, it won’t take long for your visitors to find out. It is better for them to learn about it from you rather than speculate on social networks about the outage. Do you remember how Twitter used to have issues remaining online under heavy use? They came up with what became an internet meme - the fail whale. It was their own way of saying: “Yes, there is a problem and we are working on it”.

You can now do some proactive reputation management of your own, by using their platform and our monitoring services. Your visitors have twitter accounts, and when your site goes down you will get flak on Twitter. It is just something that happens with popular websites. Fear not, for there is a solution to this problem. Being upfront about a problem will save a few twitter users the time to write about it.

By using WebSitePulse monitoring with ifttt.com you can let your Twitter followers know there is a problem, and you are working on it. Even better, you can also keep them informed of the status and inform them when the issue is cleared.

How does it work?

The alerts you get in your email are easily convertible to tweets. Obviously, we don’t want to flood twitter with too much information and unnecessary updates, so information will be provided only when the site goes down and when it recovers. To do this, you need to use two “if this then that” recipes.

The first recipe will let people know that you have experienced a problem and you are doing your best to get your website up and running. Over at ifttt.com we have set a simple rule. Each time when a new email containing the text “Timeout warning for www.example.com” is received, we would tweet the following message:

"Www.example.com is experiencing minor technical issues. We're working on it! Expect the website back online any moment now.”

Letting people know there is a problem is just as important as updating them when the website has recovered. The second recipe uses the same approach as recipe number one. We use ifttt.com to monitor our email account for a recovery message containing “Recovered www.example.com”. Then we tweet out a preset message, e.g.:

“Ok, www.example.com is back online, running like a charm. Let us know if you have experienced any problems.”

Now you have an automated system to inform your followers about site issues as they happen. It is advisable to use this approach moderately and create your own ifttt.com recipes. There are many other ways in which you can use the combination of email alerts and tweets. If you have some maintenance work scheduled, you can create a custom message based on that.

Do you have any good recipes to share? Leave them in the comment section, below.

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