The Best Tips for Building Slack Communities
Last week we did a deep dive into one of the community industry’s most fascinating and fast-growing trends: the rise of Slack as a community platform. A quick show of hands at our breakfast meetup revealed that every single person in the room was using Slack for work and for networking in communities outside of work.
To learn more about how great community managers are building their communities on Slack, we huddled with our very own Margot Mazur, Partnership Coordinator at Wistia, Phil O’Connell, Head of Customer Success at Tettra, and Jess Webb, Content Marketing Manager at Trello. Here’s what they said.
The pros and cons of Slack for communities
The fast clip of Slack conversations enables people to get to know each other in an informal, more personal way. The flip side of this pace is that Slack is not as helpful as other platforms (e.g. forums) for tracking and crowdsourcing knowledge.
“You don’t have to have a well-thought-out answer that represents you forever. That can be a barrier to posting,” says Margot. However, “finding knowledge and referring back to it is the biggest challenge right now.”
Pro Tip: Phil sets up highlight words in Slack to keep track of topics he’s interested in and gets pinged whenever people mention the highlighted words.
According to Ian Servin, an admin for Wistia’s Slack community, “External discoverability is the biggest issue, because you don’t organically stumble upon a Slack community.” Forums, on the other hand, perform well on SEO because of the large quantity of user-generated content as well as the content’s recency and relevance.
Ian added that Slack channels enable community members to find their niche and jump in right away. Wistia has channels for different geographic areas. Through these channels community members have independently organized local user meetups. Wistia also has a thriving developer community in Slack.
Setting up your Slack community
“One of the beauties of Slack is that so many people use it and so many people are fans of it. It does the work for you to create excitement, and you can’t really find that anywhere else,” says Phil.
Nevertheless, community managers should still have a plan in place for driving engagement. As Jess puts it, “Don’t fall into the ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. It’s like when you show up at a party and there’s no music.” Trello’s Slack “playlist”, led by their community manager, Erica Moss, includes monthly AMAs with Trello leadership.
If you want to get more out of Slack, upgrading to a paid plan is a good idea. According to Margot, “Putting money behind your Slack community shows members that you care.” In addition, Slack’s paid plans provide admins with a ton of data. The Wistia community’s Slack data revealed that in addition to chatting in the channels, many members were taking these connections to the next level through the Slack Calls feature.
Establishing community guidelines and norms
At Trello and Wistia, it was crucial to ensure that everyone understood what the community was for — and what it wasn’t for. For example, the Trello Slack is not a support community. These members are a mix of new users looking for best practices and power users sharing their expertise.
Similarly, the Wistia Slack isn’t a support community. It’s not for content distribution either. Blog posts are shared only once a week in the Wistia Slack. Margot notes that there is less engagement around these posts compared to other channels, such as social media, because community members are already following these.
Pro Tips: At Trello, channel descriptions were helpful for orienting people to the community. Bots can also be used for setting guidelines and prompting users with simple questions. Tettra, a simple wiki for Slack teams, is frequently used to establish community guidelines and norms.
Bot recommendation: Phil recommends Donut for pairing community members up for coffee or virtual meetings.
Norms are also established by community moderators and super users. According to Margot, Wistia has 8 Slack admins. Each channel in the Wistia Slack is owned by a member of the Wistia team. “That way it’s clear when there’s a question or issues, there’s a point-person. Fortunately, they’ve never had an issue where they’ve had to de-escalate conflict,” says Margot.
Wistia’s super users guide other users and are in charge of flagging “creepy” situations (which they’ve never had). Super users are rewarded with free tickets to WistiaFest and other goodies.
Growing your Slack community
Trello built their community by migrating their most engaged users. They kept it that way for a few months and tracked how many people accepted their Slack invitations. Then, they made a public announcement through the Trello blog. They don’t often promote it on social media, and so far their community is self-sustained by referrals.
Margot led the migration of the Wistia community to Slack. Wistia’s community used to be in a forum built with Ruby on Rails. The forum was a “nightmare” to maintain, and she found it difficult to get people engaged. “People would post once and never come back. It was very stagnant and had a lot of spam,” she says.
Pro Tip: Trello sends Typeform surveys to users in the community. These are good for getting a pulse check on what’s going well, for getting feedback, and for getting people more involved.
With Slack, maintaining the community was easier for everyone and better for fostering engagement in a more human way. Margot began by setting up Wistia’s Slack admins. After a few weeks she invited their most engaged community members into a group. Then she waited another few weeks to invite the next wave of people. “Bringing in different tiers fostered trust and got people really invested in building the community,” she says.
Acknowledgments
Massive thanks to our panelists, Margot, Jess and Phil! Thank you to Wistia for sharing their awesome bleachers with us. Such a fun office. To our friends at Tettra, thanks so much for sponsoring coffee and pastries for our group. Mad love to Alexa Lightner for taking notes, and Cheryl Centeno for taking photos. And of course thank you to everyone who attended and made this event a success.
Follow us at @CMXBOS for upcoming event announcements. Or, request an invite to our own Slack channel. :)
