How to Create a Thriving Slack Community
How to Build a Thriving Slack Community
Written by Casey Botticello
Communities drive real, measurable results for businesses. They provide opportunities to collect vital customer feedback, offer free advertising space for promoting products, reduce support costs, and more.
If you’ve been thinking about launching an online community, there’s no better time than the present.
Slack, which began life as a project management app, is quickly turning into one of the most popular open discussion platforms. It hosts numerous “public” groups – Designer Hangout and the IoT Geeks Community are just two examples – that anybody can apply to join.
In this post, we’ll help you decide if Slack is the right choice for your organization. We’ll weigh up the pros and cons before showing you exactly how to launch your community.
What is Slack?
Slack is a project management platform owned by Salesforce. It’s seen a surge in popularity in recent years – at the start of 2020, it boasted twelve million users. Its most notable features include unlimited search functionality for past messages, private messaging, and a huge library of integrations.
While Slack was originally developed as a solution for businesses looking for a space to manage their teams, organizations quickly began using it to host open discussions. Third-party Slack directories now showcase communities that anybody can join.
Slack offers an attractive free plan, which allows for an unlimited number of members. If you’re planning to launch an open community, the free option will be the most viable. This is because paid plans work on a cost-per-user basis. Scaling your community on a paid plan will almost certainly become financially untenable over the long term.
For private member communities, however, premium Slack plans may be suitable. And admins will have access to an array of advanced features.
What Are the Benefits of Creating a Slack Community?
Slack offers several advantages as a community platform. It’s a simple, intuitive application, and many community-builders find this preferable to running a fully-fledged forum.
Here’s a quick overview of the main benefits:
- Free with no limits – You don’t have to pay to use Slack software and you can add as many users as you want. Covering the costs of administrators will be your biggest expenditure. That said, features are limited on the free plan, and you won’t have access to much functionality beyond creating new channels and inviting members.
- High engagement – Slack communities tend to have high levels of member engagement. The simple, easy-to-navigate discussion dashboard and accompanying private messaging features make for an intuitive user experience.
- Easy to run – Slack communities are straightforward to run from a moderator perspective. It’s easy to create member invite links, exclude disruptive members, and start new topic discussions.
What Are The Drawbacks of Running a Community on Slack?
Despite clear positives, there are also some drawbacks to using Slack. It’s important to remember that Slack is a project management solution and, as such, lacks much of the functionality of dedicated community or forum applications.
Here is a quick overview of the main negatives:
- Limited admin, architecture, and design options – If you opt for Slack, you will have very little control over the architecture and design of your community. Beyond creating new channels and choosing from a limited number of themes, you’ll have to work within Slack’s existing configuration. As an admin, you can easily change basic settings like user permissions, notifications, language, etc.
- Few advertising opportunities – One of the main reasons that brands choose to build communities is to take advantage of advertising opportunities. A traditional forum, for example, offers numerous spaces for promoting products, services, and special offers, including in-post banner ads, dedicated forum discussion areas, user signatures, and more. On Slack, this is not the case. Your only option is to create a dedicated channel if you want to gather member feedback and showcase products.
- Lack of engagement features – While communities provide a certain level of engagement in and of themselves, additional features can help drive member interactions. Standard functionalities for achieving this aim on more traditional community platforms include algorithmically sorted feeds that showcase popular posts, email broadcasts, and rich user profiles that members can customize. Unfortunately, all of these features are absent on Slack.
How to Build a Thriving Community on Slack
With all of the background information out of the way, let’s take a look at the practicalities of building a community on Slack that attracts new members and generates engagement with your brand.
Before you set up and start configuring your Slack workspace, you need to pick a topic. Most companies pass over this stage without giving it much thought. But it’s essential in terms of laying the groundwork for your community’s future success.
Generally speaking, you have two options when it comes to selecting a theme. You might opt for a more open subject, such as “web design” or “pottery,” or start a group that is directly linked to your products and services.
In either case, it’s important to pick a subject that meets two criteria. First, it should be related to the industry your business operates in. Second, it should appeal to your customers’ and potential customers’ interests. And the key is to rely on research, not your intuitions or assumptions about what your customers want.
Boost your chances of success by asking the following questions:
- Are there similar communities online and are they popular?
- Have you asked your existing customers about the topics they’re interested in?
- Are potential topics related to your brand, product, and services?
If the answer to these questions is yes, you’re likely working from a solid foundation and can move on to the next step.
Setting up a Slack community is straightforward and completely free. If you want to upgrade to a paid plan to access advanced features, you can do so at a later date.
Follow the steps below to set up your open Slack group:
- Head over to the Slack website and follow the step-by-step instructions. When picking a name, be sure to go for something that’s reasonably short and memorable.
- Configure your community’s settings by selecting Settings & administration from the dropdown in the top left corner of your Slack workspace (click on your community’s name). You can also modify the workspace design by navigating to Preferences from the same dropdown menu.
- Add channels by selecting Add channels from the main menu on the left of the screen. Your members will use these channels to discuss topics with each other.
- Slack also has a large library of integrations. You can connect to third-party services like Google Drive, Trello, Zoom, and so on by selecting Apps from the main menu.
Slack doesn’t have its own discovery platform. This means promotion is all down to you. To invite members, you’ll need to use Slack’s invitation tool.
Log in to your Slack workspace and open the dropdown menu by clicking on the name of your group in the top left corner of the screen. Select Invite People to… to bring up the invite pop-up.
You have two options: copy-and-paste the emails of the people you’d like to invite and send them each an email or create an invite link that your customers can use to join the group. Invite links can be used by up to 2000 people and can be set to expire.
When it comes to building your community, you’ll first need to gather the emails of would-be members before you can invite them. One strategy for doing this is to host a sign-up form on your website. People can then submit their email addresses and you can respond with an email or an invite link.
You should also leverage promotion tools, both paid and organic, to attract new members.
Here are three suggestions:
- Post-purchase emails – Whenever a customer makes a purchase, send them an invite link to your Slack group in a follow-up email.
- Slack directories – Directories are online listings of open Slack groups. Slofile and Standuply are two examples. Get in touch and ask them to add your group.
- Advertising on your site – Include banner ads on your site that let visitors know about your community. Link these ads to a sign-up form where people can submit their email address. Paid ads, especially on social media, are another option.
Word of mouth is a powerful force when it comes to new communities. As you develop a loyal membership base, you will experience a snowball effect. Organic growth will occur as more and more members tell their colleagues and friends about your company’s Slack group.
Forums are excellent venues for gathering feedback to better understand your market. You can test the waters with new product ideas, find out about problems, generate ideas for new prototypes, and, of course, determine how to improve your community.
It’s a good idea to start a dedicated channel for customer feedback. This will prevent your admins from intruding on existing discussions when asking questions. In addition, members can be directed to another channel if they wish to participate.
And while Slack only offers limited advertising opportunities, it’s still good practice to take advantage of the ones that do exist. You can notify people of special offers and even create a dedicated space for members-only offers.
Conclusion
If you’ve been thinking about building a community, there’s no better time than now to launch one.
In 2020, 76% of internet users participated in an online group. And in one study, 66% of respondents reported that their communities positively impact customer retention, web traffic, and product development.
Slack provides a simple, intuitive platform for building a discussion space. It’s free, easy to run, and adapts to the needs of your business.
However, there is a caveat.
While Slack is valued by many businesses, it’s not right for everyone. Dedicated forum software, like PeerBoad, will likely be preferable for companies that want to access a wider feature set and exercise more control over the design and architecture of their community interface.
Our advice? Give both a go and see which one works for you. You can sign up for a free PeerBoard account in minutes.
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