How We Use Slack to be a More Effective Content Marketing Team

What Slack integrations are you and your content marketing team using?

Have you ever found a tool that totally changed the way you work? One of those tools at BuzzFarmers has been CoSchedule (which we wrote about here) and another has been Slack. We also used HipChat for a long time, which we still love, but ultimately we moved over to Slack about six months ago.

It’s truly been the game changer I didn’t see coming.

Let me walk you through how we use Slack to be a more effective content marketing team. Hint: it involves some pretty cool Slack integrations.

Brainstorming on the fly

“We are our clients,” it sounds weird but it’s the truth. When we’re creating content campaigns for our clients, we’re creating content that will be published on the web on their behalf. This is a large responsibility that we don’t take lightly.

Slack helps our team quickly ask questions about our clients, their customers and the overall voice for that brand. It lets us brainstorm quickly with the entire team, without wasting time in meetings. We’re asking so many more questions now and we’re getting to answers faster. Not to mention, new team members are getting up to speed 4x faster than they did a year ago.

Staying G’d up

We use Google Docs as our main document management tool at BuzzFarmers because we often have more than one person working on content at a time. Sometimes one person is writing while another is writing social, while another is editing.

Content campaigns, BuzzAudits, and editorial calendars all spend some time in Google Docs, and Slack has some amazing Google Docs integrations that we are just beginning to scratch the surface on.

Check out the Slack Search & Google Docs integration. This feature will let you search any of your Google Docs right from Slack. It’s pretty simple to implement:

1. Create a new Google Doc or have one that you’d like Slack to have access to.
2.  Paste the link into Slack and authenticate your account and your document.
3. Try searching for it within Slack search.

Our content team can quickly review buyer personas, editorial calendars, and other client related documents without having to fire up a web browser. It’s also helpful when you need to reference something while having discussions with team members.

Picking headlines

We’ve recently integrated Subcurrent’s polling system into our Slack channels to vote on article headlines for BuzzFarmers posts, tweets, and even voting on who makes the best homemade ice cream in Rhode Island. Well OK, we did that in person, with nine pints of ice cream. But we could have tallied the votes on Slack.

In fact, I used it to pick the title for this article. This is a great tool for our editors to take a step back from the post and get someone else’s eyes on a headline. All they need to do is type /poll and their butts off and the answers are anonymous.

Listening to social chatter

We use Notify to alert us on Slack of when anyone mentions BuzzFarmers or any of our clients. Notify searches many different channels for mentions, like Product Hunt, Twitter, Quora, and Hacker News. They’ll be adding more channels like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in the near future. Our Community Manager Jim Almo loves Notify, now he never misses an opportunity to say thanks!

Getting a laugh with giphy

Giphy is by far the most loved Slack integration. The Giphy Slack integration lets us quickly share animated GIFs by invoking the /giphy command and typing in a phrase.

Take a look at the image below, you can see Jim’s Slack message /giphy SCHWEET. 

This best part is you never know what animated GIF, Giphy will return. This makes for some magic moments when the animated GIF aligns perfectly with the phrase you’ve invoked. It’s even better when the GIF returned is so fantastically not relevant, the entire office will burst out into laughter. It’s a nice break from the hard work and a fast way to have a laugh with the team and boost morale.

Getting a whole team to use a new tool is such a huge hurdle for any company, but the Slack integration eco-system is growing exponentially. It’s like comparing WordPress when it launched, to WordPress now, where the ecosystem of plugins turn it into an entirely different beast (and a good one at that!)

Check out Product Hunt’s Slack App Collection for these Slack integrations and more.

Does your team use Slack? Which integrations do you use the most? Let me know in the comments.