I spoke with a small business the other day about their plans for IT investment. They listed a few customer service-related capabilities they wanted to add better software solutions to for. They also spoke about monitoring social media for mentions of their business, good or bad. They talked about deploying some sophisticated customer management software that had this built-in. Fair enough I suppose, but that made me think about Microsoft Flow and Power Automate a little. Flow is part of most Office 365 licenses and does not require much training to get started with. There are hundreds of cloud connectors and countless templates to start with.

Flow will let you dip your toes into Social Media monitoring. There are ready templates for the Twitter connector for example that trigger a workflow every time your keyword (eg. Your business or brand name) is mentioned in a tweet. Such a workflow can send an email or post to Teams with the Tweet details. Flow can also compose a reply and store the details in a list or spreadsheet.

All this can be achieved with less than an hour’s work and without much technical knowledge.

Here is how it’s done?

• Start at: flow.microsoft.com and login using your office 365 credentials.
• Halfway down the page you’ll see a list of popular services Flow integrates with:

• You select Twitter. There are a host of ready-made templates relating to Twitter for you to chose from. To start with I’d chose this:

• You will need to supply details about your Office 365 and Twitter credentials: