Flow is a great way to automatically capture data and content as its being created, but not all of the useful data to an organization is going to be within its tenant. Every second around 6,000 tweets are sent out on Twitter and some of those tweets may effect your organization, and would be worth preserving for the future. For example, in the case of a legal suit a Flow could be created to capture any tweets sent from an individuals account with specific keywords or phrases. Or another example, in the case of a company with government contracts, it may be useful to capture tweets sent from specific individuals accounts that may concern their business. In either scenario, capturing tweets in a SharePoint list allows the users to perform data analysis on the contents of the tweets using the rest of the O365 suite. The steps to create the Flow are listed below:

  • Create a SharePoint list to store the data that you will be capturing. You will need a SharePoint column for every piece of information you want to capture about that tweet. For example, I generally like to capture the time that the tweet was sent and the text of the tweet.
  • From Flow, create a new Flow with the Twitter trigger “When a new tweet is posted”
    • The capture settings can be anything from a string like “hello world”, to a hashtag (#helloworld), to a username (from:@realdonaldtrump).
  • Add a step, and choose the “Condition” control. For this scenario, we will add “Tweet Text” to the left hand side of the equation and enter in whatever word you would like to monitor for on the right side.
    • Note: Do not use “Original Tweet Text”
  • Adding a “Condition” control will automatically give you two columns below that action, an
    “If Yes” column, and an “If No” column. In most scenarios, the “If No” column can be left empty simply because if the Tweet Text doesn’t contain the text that you are searching for you probably don’t care about the tweet.
  • For the “If Yes” column, select “Add an Action” and add the “Create Item” action from SharePoint and enter the Site Address and List Name of the list that you created earlier.
  • For every column that you have created in the list, drag dynamic content from the tweet into the corresponding column. As an example, I want the “Tweet Text” to be stored in the Title column in my SharePoint list.
  • In some cases it may be enough to end the Flow here, but others will want to be notified that a tweet was stored to the SharePoint list. To add this notification functionality, simply add “Send me a mobile notification” action to the “Yes” condition column to get notified via mobile or “Send me an email notification” to get notified via email.

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