Should sports clubs and brands use Slack?

In the last 3 years, ever since its launch, one company was constantly named as one of the fastest growing Silicon Valley startups. I’m talking about Slack, company valued at $3,8B , company named the youngest billion dollar startup by Fortune magazine in 2015, company that enjoys 4 million active daily users and company whose clients include IBM, Conde Nast and LinkedIn.

What Is Slack?

I am guessing I have your attention now and I can go into technical stuff. To sum it up, Slack is a modern real-time messaging tool that has a decent chance to put an end to e-mail. Slack works very effectively as a mix of features from already existing platforms, like Twitter and Whatsapp, among others.

Major advantage Slack has over any other messaging tool is its integration ability. Slack integration consists of three types of integration: Pre-Built Integrations, If This Then That (IFTTT) or Build your own. Pre-Built Integrations offer ability to integrate data from plethora of various other platforms, like for example social media platforms, or data and services from tools like PayPal.

Your own tool can also easily be integrated into Slack, which is probably the most praised option Slack offers and key advantage Slack has over any other communication tool.

As a real-time data messaging tool Slack of course offers user-friendly features to communicate, just like any other communication tool does, but Slack’s preferences take it a step further than other communication tools. They offer a great deal of features that can be adjusted on both company and individual level, based on demands of each user. Slack also offers centralization of all your notifications from any other platform or tool.

Slack is valued at (in billions of $)

Lastly, one more user friendly feature Slack offers is its pricing system with its “free to use forever” pricing tier. I could go on to describe how well Slack works, but it is the best to see it for yourselves.

Everything that’s been said, as well as Slack’s technical details are not the reason I wrote this article. This is.

How Can Slack be Used for Sports Marketing Purposes?

As I already mentioned before, Slack can, for example, centralize all social media platforms into a Slack channel and that way the whole marketing team can internally, inside a Slack channel, decide on their further actions based on this data. The New York Times, for example, developed their own “Slackbot”, internal application that helps them decide what to post on their social media accounts.

Questions like “Is this a post for Twitter or Snapchat?” or “Should we retweet this?” are much easier to decide with Slack – this is definitely a big plus in today’s world where every successful sports brand must have accounts on several social media platforms.

But that is not the best feature Slack has for you.

million daily Slacks users

Slack is constantly being named a tool every sports marketer needs. Newswhip.com named Slack as one of top 5 tools every social media marketers needs in 2016, alongside “giants” like Snapchat, Extreme-Action Videography, Live-Streaming Platforms and Virtual Reality. Now, that’s quite a company to be a part of. And the before praised Slack’s integration is one of the reasons for this.

Slack itself encourages the development of similar “apps” with $80M investments in startups whose mission is to build software integrated with Slack. Their logic could not be more simple, and more correct – the more these apps appear, more popularity Slack gets.

With every advancement in life quality people get more spoiled. In this day and age, sport fans expect to have more access and real time updates about sport teams and events they follow. On one hand, Slack offers fans ability to fine tune their updates to their preferences, while on the other hand it offers limitless possibilities for social media experts to get a better feeling of their fans preferences with intelligent use of this powerful tool. Time has become the most valuable asset in today’s world and everything that can help save time has a great chance of success. Slack is just that for the both sides – content creators and content consumers.

Content creators have Slack as a tool for easier input data organization and Slack integration as a feature for creation of apps with individual preferences of input data analysis. Content consumers have Slack communication features and preferences at their disposal to organize the input data they want to receive in a way they want to recieve it.

Future Potential

Slack communication can be divided into 3 groups: Channels, Direct Messages and Private Groups. Channels are the most interesting group of these 3. They can be created for a certain topic and every member of the group can see them. This is where users saw the opportunity to create ”digital communities” that have every advantage somewhat forgotten forums had.

Same as forums, they provide answers, advice and business connecting possibilities, but they also provide a sense of community for growing population of solo workers, working alone communicating through the Internet with their co-workers from around the globe. The ever-growing community of channels already consists of group for startup owners, team leaders, marketers, people in need of creative inspiration, programmers, etc.

Sport clubs and brands may decide and create their own public Slack channels or communities for their fans. If a fan already works at a company where Slack is used and he/she has a work project channel, that same fan could also have their favorite sports club’s channel within that same Slack app. Same place for business and pleasure. This would make fans once again feel involved into their club’s community and, as Snapchat taught us, this is the feeling all fans treasure.

Of course, Slack’s notification preferences would prevent overwhelming amount of pointless message notifications same as they do for already existing Slack communities.

Conclusion

Slack’s channels are mainly designed to support intra-team communication. But same as Snapchat, original idea can grow and develop into something even better. Recent addition to Slack – “Threads”, for example did just that.

Slack itself doesn’t even have to be a creator of its next feature. Its integration friendly tool can help grow another tool that will make Slack take a next step. This makes Slack a tool that can help improve marketing content, ease business communication and save time, so naturally, it has a great future ahead.

Sooner you start using Slack and discover all the possibilities Slack offers, sooner you will be able to reap the benefits of this (potentially) next big thing.

Just as few years ago nobody would understand what “he snapchated a video” means, and in the future “he is slacking with the client” might have a completely different meaning than it does today.