Power Automate – A Marketing Tool for Writers – Part 1

I am fairly new to the word of Power Automate – also known as Microsoft Flow – but I have to say – it’s awesome. You do need Microsoft 365 and the basic, free package is not as versatile as the paid packages, but it’s useful nonetheless.

https://unitedkingdom.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

Basically it’s a tool in which the user can set up ‘flows’ – for example – I have several tweets scheduled at specific times. Flow will tweet the text I put in, to the Twitter account of my choice and fetch the image I want attached from dropbox, (or any of the other apps available) and post it on a specific day at a specific time. Another option – I have set to to email me when a certain phrase is tweeted – so I can see how many times it’s retweeted. You could have a book title, a specific phrase or username. It’s a good way of seeing how much traffic your tweets get. It has over 400 connections to services like Twitter, Trello, Sharepoint and lots more.

I use it in the day job to log the responses from forms to an excel document, but it can email a specific user informing them a new response has been posted.

You can make an automated flow – in my case emailing me when a certain twitter phrase is used; a scheduled flow – to go out on this day, at this time, with this frequency. It can do more (but I haven’t investigated it that far.

So far I have 50 flows set up, mostly to tweet and track tweets.

Power automate provide templates for the more common tasks, but you can set up you own.

There are guided tutorials https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/automate-process-power-automate/

You can automate 3 types of flows

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/flow-types

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/get-started-flows/1-introduction

To set up a flow you click on CREATE FLOW

If I want to make a scheduled flow for example a twitter post) I would click scheduled flow, add in the set up details as below

Flow name – You can call this anything.

Run this flow – this would be the date you want to start the actions – it defaults to today at 10am but you can change it.

Repeat every – pick a number (1 day, 1 days etc). If you choose week – then you can select specific days of the week

Hit create

This will take you to this screen

Click NEW STEP (this will then allow you to add an action)

If you can’t find the connectors – type POST A TWEET (or whatever) in the box. You will have to grant Power Automate access to Twitter (this is true of the other connections, like dropbox), but it is secure.

Add in the tweet text – including the URL if you have one. You are limited the the character restrictions on twitter. If you want to add images then you would add another step – and select where the image is adding the file path. Th

In the top right you can save, check the stages and test. The flow checker will let you know if there are errors and how to fix them. It’s a good idea to test the flow – this can be done manually (you will need to do this the first time), or automatically – this will duplicate a previous successful run. You will then get a link to the FLOW RUNS page and this will let you know if your flow is successful.

How is this useful for writers? You can set up tweets, post to various newsletters, or get followers. I think you can back up documents using an automated flow.

More time to write:)