How To Integrate Medium With Orbit via Zapier

Being a "single source of truth" for all your community activity is one of the main reasons our users love Orbit.

If members of your community are writing about you on Medium, we want to make sure to import those activities into your workspace.

Medium supports RSS feeds for tags and we’ve built a Zapier workflow that allows users to poll the RSS feed for a specific tag on Medium and add the articles to Orbit.

The Zap can be found here.

The Zap works by grabbing the RSS feed, pulling out specific Medium articles from it, and then creating members and activities in Orbit.

The Zap works in four steps: 

1. Trigger: Any time a new item is created in RSS by Zapier
2. Action: Filter my data in Filter by Zapier (optional)
3. Action: Format my data in Formatter by Zapier
4. Action: Create activity in Orbit

Trigger: Any time a new item is created in RSS by Zapier

Start by using an RSS trigger—this looks for the new item in the feed. It polls every 15 minutes to see if there's anything new.

You will need to paste your publicly accessible RSS Feed URL from Medium into the Zap. Medium allows you to pull feeds for specific profiles, specific publications, or tags applied to posts. Click here for more information on Medium RSS Feed URLs.

If you select the “Tagged pages in a publication” type of RSS feed, the tag you choose can be anything. 

Just remember: if the tag is too generic, the workflow will find a large quantity of articles, some of which may be irrelevant to what you’re actually trying to find. 

For example, “Orbit” is generic. But “Orbit Model” or “Orbit API” are more specific.  

It’s better to be specific because you don’t want to create unnecessary noise in your Orbit workspace with an excess of activities. 

Action: Filter my data in Filter by Zapier (optional) 

Next, if you want to further filter the Medium articles that are triggering the workflow, use the “Only continue if…” step. 

For example, if your company has an official blog on Medium, you might not want to create activities in Orbit for official blog posts. If so, you could add a filter to make sure certain keywords that indicate your official blog are not included in the URL. 

Another example would be checking for a username by making sure that the URL includes an @ symbol or that part of the URL before medium.com also contains a username. This is based on Medium’s URL structure: there’s either an @ symbol in front of the username, or, if you've turned on the Subdomain feature, then it’s username.medium.com.

With these filters in place, we're looking for Medium users who are creating content about your specified tag.

If you don’t want to add any filters, delete this step in the workflow.

Action: Format my data in Formatter by Zapier

This action will parse the URL of the Medium post to extract the Medium Username of the author. This is the trickiest step and will require some RegEx knowledge in order to successfully extract the username.

The username is not always present in the feed. Sometimes it is the same as the author name, sometimes it isn't. In our testing, we used the RegEx pattern “@[a-zA-Z0-9]+” to extract the username that’s preceded by an “@” from the URL.

Action: Create activity in Orbit

Now, we have everything we need to create an activity in Orbit. We've got the title of the post, the URL of the post, the author user name, their Medium username, and a few other pieces of metadata we can pass in.

We suggest using “medium:article:published” as your Activity Type Key and set the Custom Identity Source to medium. If content creation is important for your community goals, consider using a higher Activity Weight for this Activity Type, such as 6 (the highest weight is 10, the lowest is 0). 

In the end, your Zap step should look something like this:

As you can see, we added some additional information like an activity description, a link to the post, and when it was published.

Some things to keep in mind

• There's no email address or profile data in the feed that Medium provides, so the user will be created with their author name and/or their Medium username.
• This creates a custom “identity” in Orbit for the user based on the Medium username.
• Once they are created as members in Orbit, most Medium authors will need to be merged into their other profiles if they already exist in Orbit.
• There's no historical import (Medium only presents a limited set of recent articles in their feeds).
• There's no way to track interactions or comments (as this information is also not included in the RSS feed). 

Any questions about integrating Medium with Orbit?

This is a custom solution that may require an advanced understanding of Zapier. If you have any questions, please send an email to [email protected] 

Happy Orbiting! 🚀

P.S. Thank you to Martyn on our Product team who designed this process and Will on our Solutions Engineering team who helped with edits.