As Bloggers and Online Marketers, people spend lot of time preparing content for their blogs. But another overheads which comes over it is maintaining your social media profiles. Being active on Social Media profiles is an important factor these days for success of any brand these days. But taking out time to manage out all your social profiles at once could be another time consuming task.
What is Microsoft Flow?
Microsoft Flow is an online solution that helps you create automated workflows to connect popular online platforms and services with each other. With Flow, one can set triggers that can be associated with an online service and create a workflow from there to define what happens next when that trigger fires.
Flow provides an easy to use set of tools that a person can get adapted to very quickly and start building custom workflows in a matter of minutes.
There are also a set of readymade Templates available that help make the process quicker.
A Basic Example:
You want to be notified over email whenever there is a new message posted on BaseCamp. BaseCamp users might say that it is something which already is there so why we need this. Yes, it is there but think if it was not there, but you want to be notified for that activity, how would you know that? Microsoft Flow is here to rescue.
By linking your BaseCamp account and setting a trigger to email you whenever there is a new message, you can get all updates in your inbox without having to visit BaseCamp.
How to reduce time spent on Social Media with Microsoft Flow?
So, you now know what Microsoft Flow does, but what to go a step further and know how it can reduce your overhead. Let us assume that you run a blog and want that as soon as a blog post is made, it should get posted on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Using Microsoft Flow, you can make this happen easily.
In simple terms, you need to create a workflow that would watch an RSS feed and observe it for any new change. As soon as it gets updated, it will post updates on the linked Social Media channels with the content that you have specified in the workflow.
I have created a video explaining how you can do this with Microsoft Flow, which you can watch below:
Advanced Features of Microsoft Flow:
Conditions in Flow let you dig deeper into the workflows and define specific relationships and conditions such that you can filter out what content should go where and what happens when a particular condition matches.
Custom APIs is an advanced offering from Microsoft Flow. Though by default Flow supports popular public services, there could be a chance that you want to leverage power of Microsoft Flow with your own API. You can do this by exploring the Microsoft Flow Developer Guide. and see how custom APIs can be linked and managed with Microsoft Flow.
