How to Monitor Your Brand with Slack

Using Apps to Learn How to Monitor your Brand with Slack

In a previous post, we looked at how marketers can use Slack to build communities, much like creating groups on LinkedIn. (If you're still working on that, the folks at Slack sent us a great piece on building communities also.) This post focuses on using Slack as a marketing tool, whether you're a band of many or a group of one. Slack is a team-based messaging app that is extensible, meaning that third parties can create apps to extend the functionality of the platform. You can definitely learn how to monitor your brand with Slack using a few simple apps.

There are literally hundreds of apps in the Slack App Directory in a number of categories including communication, customer support, marketing and productivity. Any member of a team can add an app, though team owner or administrators can limit this ability. Apps are easily integrated with Slack through the directory or by clicking on an app's "Add to Slack" button.

Learning how to monitor your brand with Slack means you only have one place to check, resulting in fewer emails and notifications. Plus, the ability to do a full-text search on your activity log makes it easier to find items. If you're already using Slack for collaboration, now you can keep your team updated. There's virtually an app for every activity. If not, you can always create your own "recipes" on IFTTT.

Here's a look at a few monitoring apps and how you can integrate them into your marketing workflow.

This app can be used to monitor mentions of your company, competitors, and topics of interest. Notify watches dozens of sources including Twitter and Facebook, sending a Slack notification every time it finds a match. For general web monitoring, you can always use Google Alerts and use that feed to add to your Slack channel. More details can be found here. Notify can be very helpful when you're learning how to monitor your brand with Slack.

If you're using Google Analytics, New Relic or Mixpanel, consider employing Statsbot to query your analytics and monitor your brand with Slack. For example sending this command in Slack "@statsbot users" shows how many people visited your site today, plus how many visited last week and presents the info along with a line chart.

Arc summarizes Google Analytics in Slack and provides your team with straightforward and understandable information. This is a great addition for those that don't actively monitor their analytics and want something that's simple to interpret.

This app shows the most recent articles along with the corresponding number of shares and page views. It sends a notification when it detects that a piece content is starting to go viral so that you can provide additional promotion.

Technically this isn't a Slack app. It's a WordPress plugin that sends a notification to a Slack channel when a post is published, or there's a new comment.

Both MailChimp and GetResponse have apps that notify Slack team members about a number of actions including new subscribes and unsubscribes, and newsletter publication.

Implementing Your Monitoring Efforts with Slack

In some cases, you need to weigh the number of channels versus the amount of information. Although it's tempting to have one channel for everything, information will get lost in this sea of data. Likewise, having too many specific channels will cause unnecessary complexity. Relevancy versus volume of data is a delicate balancing act. You will need to refine your feeds over time to ensure you maintain an equilibrium.