What is Slack?

Slack is a digital workspace that allows teams and groups to communicate and collaborate on topics and projects. A team is a group of people that you work with every day who use Slack to communicate. A Slack Team is the digital space where you share information.

The employees at a small or medium-sized company will be part of one Slack Team. People in a large company, especially distributed companies will have sub-groups within a team.

Your Slack workspace contains channels which are organized around a specific topic, project or location. The channels can be public or private. Within each channel, you have conversations with members of the team.

For a company, Slack’s greatest advantage is the integration with other systems. For example, tracking bugs and software development with GitHub or following customer service tickets from a customer service platform. This allows employees to go to one place and interface with all the corporate systems.

Why Slack?

In the crowded world of messaging apps, Slack has created a tool that easily connects groups of people. One of the benefits of Slack compared to Slack alternatives is its integration with many other services. Another benefit is the opportunity for users to be active in an open community. 

What is a Slack Community?

A Slack community is a group of users who congregate around a distinct topic, such as developers, sales, marketing, entrepreneurs, or around a specific location, such as Denver Colorado. The community can be even more specific such as Denver Marketers.

The community operates as a group chat where each discussion is organized into a specific channel. Let’s say you are part of the Denver Marketers Slack group. Within this group, there will be channels such as inbound, outbound, social media, advertising, direct marketing, etc. The user can chat with any member in the channel where everyone can view the conversation, or the user can send a direct message to a specific member in the group.

The benefit of joining a Slack community is that you get real-time responses when you ask a question, make a recommendation, share your experience or request feedback. A Slack community is a great place to find like-minded people who have the same issues and can share their solutions.

Slack communities are by invitation only so there is control over who can join. Unlike other groups on Facebook or LinkedIn, Slack groups reduce noise and spam because they only offer relevant content and interaction between members.

Next Steps

The next question is not “Should I join a Slack community,” but rather, “Which Slack community should I join?” There are groups for everything from business professionals to software developers to musicians. We compiled a list of some of the most popular groups. Happy Slacking!

Marketing and Business Slack Communities

CRO Growth Hacks – crohacks.slack.com – A community sharing on conversion rate optimization growth hacks from CRO, SEO, SEM, email, business models and more. (Note this is the author’s Slack community) Request to Join

Online Geniuses – onlinegeniuses.slack.com – One of the largest online marketing communities that also has offline meetups. Request to Join

Inbound.org – inboundorg.slack.com – A group of inbound marketing enthusiasts. Request to Join

Startup – startup.slack.com – Share your thoughts with other startup founders and investors. Request to Join

Launch – launch.slack.com – A community of like-minded entrepreneurs, designers, developers and makers. Request to Join

CreativeTribes – creativetribes.slack.com – Find and connect with marketing people in various niches. Request to Join

Designer Hangout – designerhangout.slack.com – Collaborate with other UX designers and researchers to discuss user experience. Request to Join 

People – people.slack.com – A community chat for HR professionals. Request to Join

Buffer – buffercommunity.slack.com – Social media professionals. Request to Join

Freelance – freelance.slack.com – A community of freelance professionals. Request to Join

Convertists – convertists.slack.com – A community for sales development professionals. Request to join

Product School – A large community of product managers. Request to join

10X Factory – Is a paid group that focuses on providing entrepreneurs with the network, education, and mastermind they need at an affordable price.  The fee keeps out the riff-raff! There are a wide variety of topics to get help and post your comments on. Many users are asking for help and most had 2-5 responses. So the community of over 800 is very engaged.

• The network. We have a lot of people who only connect in channels, but over 70% of our messages are direct messages and we have several members who chat over the phone or meetup. You can see this, especially in the #shoutouts channel.
• The education. Our community is a wealth of knowledge, but we also have training videos hosted on a wiki called tettra.
• The hotsteats. Every other week, we have a live video chat session where one person hops on video chat with 5-20 other entrepreneurs to discuss their top business challenges, and our team of entrepreneurs help solve that for them.

Jacuzzi Club – A chat room for people building brands and products in technology, fashion and beyond. Request to join

Warmup – Share email addresses and warm them up to increase deliverability. Request to join.

Developers and Technical

Testing – testing.slack.com – A Slack chat for software testing, Quality Assurance, QA and testers. Request to Join

iOS Developers – ios-developers.slack.com – A community for iOS developers. Request to Join

Code Newbie – codenewbie.slack.com – A community of software developers and programmers. Request to Join

Slash Rocket – slashrocket.slack.com – A developer community of all skill levels. Request to Join

DevOps Chat – devopschat.slack.com – Chat and learn about DevOps. Request to Join

Tech Masters – techmasters.slack.com –  A community of technologists from around the world. Request to Join

Developers – hashtagdevelopers.slack.com – A global developers community. Request to Join

HackerX – A chat community of hackers and makers from around the world. Request to Join

Internet of Things – anythings.slack.com – A wide variety of internet topics. Request to Join

Side Project – sideproject.slack.com – Find collaborators and other side projecteers. Request to Join

ThisHosting.Rocks – A Slack community to discuss all things related to web hosting. Request to Join

Gratify – This Slack add-on allows you to meet, hire and pay technical experts and freelancers without leaving Slack. More info

Fun Stuff

Music – music.slack.com – A community of artists and musicians. Request to Join

Episodes – episodes.slack.com – A community for TV watchers. Request to Join

Travel Talk – traveltalk.slack.com – A chat community for travelers. Request to Join

Star Wars – starwarschat.slack.com – A community of Star Wars fans talking about Star Wars. Request to Join

Street Workout – street-workout.slack.com – A street workout community chat group. Request to Join

Work From – workfrom.slack.com – A community for remote and work-from-home professionals. Request to Join

Sports Geek HQ – sportsbiz.slack.com – A chat group for people in the sports business. Request to Join

If you have a Slack group and you want to be added to this list, please contact us.