Hi, I’m Clint, a Customer Champion at Zapier! I’m obsessed with Google Sheets, Zap loops, and becoming omniscient through the power of Zapier. This week, I want to discuss a simple Zap that will let you know whenever multiple keywords are mentioned in any public Slack channel.

The Challenge

When I first started at Zapier, there were a couple of people who seemed to show up magically whenever their name was mentioned, OR any projects they were responsible for. It took me way too long to figure out that this was a fairly simple Zap that essentially let them monitor our entire Slack for multiple keywords in a single Zap - pretty slick!

The Solution

By using the “New Public Message Posted Anywhere” trigger, we can make a Zap that triggers on every single message in a non-private channel. Of course, this should be used with caution - this can use up all of your tasks very quickly! 

That’s where the Filter comes in. By filtering on the “Text” field, we can stop the Zap from running unless a specific keyword is mentioned. In this case, I chose my first or last name, OR my special project codenamed “Charger”:

Technically, you could do this with 3 Zaps, each using the “New Mention” trigger. But this way, you can add as many criteria as you want and just use the one Zap, instead of having 17 Zaps to track 17 words.

The action after the filter can be whatever you want! In my case, I’m sending myself a DM whenever I am mentioned, but it’s completely up to you. You could send a reply message, trigger a more complicated workflow, DM the person who sent the message, or pretty much anything else.

Wrapping Up

Honestly, this is pretty simple, but could certainly lead to advanced use cases. In fact, we have so many Zaps connected to Slack internally, it might be our most connected app. I’m sure you can think of some creative uses for this!

PS If you’re looking to do even more with Slack, we recently published an article with 5 tips that can help you level up :)