Stream Post to SMS with Twilio

This walkthrough will show you how to leverage Zapier and your Twilio account to push information from Beekeeper to an SMS message.

This walkthrough will specifically focus on sending Posts from a specific Stream to a single hardcoded phone number. While this is the base use case, you can expand it to message multiple hardcoded numbers, or to message a number related to the post or the author (more about that at the end).

Initial Knowledge and Resources

This tutorial assumes that you have visited our Beekeeper Zapier page and have the following:

• An admin enabled, user visible Beekeeper Bot
• An account with Zapier (a free account will work for this zap)
• A Twilio account with SMS capabilities

Setup

1.) Navigate to Zapier, log in, and connect the Beekeeper app with the Twilio app using the drop-downs. Then set the actions to be New Post and Send SMS respectively. Then click Use Zap.

2.) In the Beekeeper Task, select or connect your account. Then choose the stream you want to send the message from (here I've selected the General stream).

3.) Once you click Continue, click Test Trigger and select, from the drop-down a post you wish to test the Zap with.

4.) After completing the Beekeeper Trigger task, you will now configure your Twilio account! For this, choose Twilio as the app and Send SMS as the Action Event. After hitting Continue follow the flow to add in your Twilio account. 

5.) Once in the Customize Sms page, you can now construct how you wish to send this text. As the SMS will come from a Twilio provisioned number, select that for the From Number field. In the To Number field, add in the phone number (or numbers, separated by a comma) that you wish to be notified of this post. Lastly in the Message section of this page, construct the information you would like to share. Here I've added the Post Title and Post Text that will be pulled directly from the Beekeeper post. 

6.) Once configured click Continue and and test the zap. If everything connects correctly, click the tab on the bottom of the page, or the toggle in the upper right to enable your zap!

Congratulations! You've created a fully enabled post-to-text zap, enjoy all the benefits of seamless employee communication internal and external to Beekeeper.

Further Considerations

This zap is designed to be demonstrative and show the possibilities of this Zapier integration. You can expand the functionality of this zap by adding more number to the To Number field, and even use the poster's name or other information to better clarify the message.