Slack has over four million daily active users (DAU) and over one million paid Slack accounts. What’s the deal?
Slack’s platform is one of the most effective ways to grow and engage a community online. Almost every niche from medicine to venture capital uses Slack. These communities are growing fast, and many have thousands of members in them.
If you’ve never seen Slack’s interface, here’s a peek into Product Manager HQ’s Slack. They have close to three thousand product managers in this community. Kevin Lee, the founder of Product Manager HQ, receives many referrals from this community to the point where his business is now run almost entirely on referrals.
How do you organize your Slack community? It starts with channels. Channels operate similarly to Facebook Workplace groups. They represent a place of specific interest. These channels could include “Partnerships,” “Job Postings,” “Feedback,” “Small Wins,” and “Speaking Opportunities.” In Product Manager HQ, they have Slack channels for the major cities their participants are from which helps foster in-person relationships – how cool!
The basics!
Also, similar to Facebook Workplace, you want to have a channel that acts as the main news feed. You can call it “Random Channel.” This will provide your members a place to engage with all different types of content freely. With that in mind, you also want to have an “Announcements” channel with posting access only designated to the admins. This channel will enable you to keep your community in the loop for big projects.
Before you get too excited about Slack, go to Slack’s settings to ensure people engage the right way in your community. If you include an @channel in your message, then it will notify everyone in it. Delegate this power wisely. Click the “Permissions” tab to set “Who can use @channel and @here” to “Team admins and owners.” Now, scroll down to “Apps & Custom Integrations,” click expand, then set it to “Team owners and selected members.”
To keep your Slack channels active, you want to do regular live streams, AMAs, organize Meetups, post valuable content, and more. To add some flare in a few minutes, use Zapier to integrate various notifications from pulling in Tweets from specific usernames, website job postings, and WordPress blog posts. Now, you’re almost ready to launch your Slack community.
What’s holding you back?
All good marketers need community analytics. With Statsbot ($5/user/month), you can analyze your various channels, set up automated reporting, and more. It’s the most powerful analytics tool if you’re looking to run your Slack communities like a pro. If you like to experiment, then see how different tactics and strategies influence your metrics. With enough experimenting, you’ll come up with a strong, scalable content framework to nurture and grow your community.
If you’re looking to jump into the world of Slack, the learning curve is small, and the benefits are HUGE. However, no one said running a community is easy. In fact, it might take many long nights for producing content. Figuring how to engage your community better before you begin seeing promising results is also a task!
With that said, many companies and communities have effectively adopted Slack as another channel for lead generation, branding, and expanding their community. If you’re looking to invest in long-term community assets that will scale with your company, then place Slack as a growth tactic at the top of your list. Now you just need to find your first community members.
