Slack, the team collaboration tool, is taking the world by storm. It was the quickest company to achieve a billion dollar valuation. It’s used by everyone from NASA to news networks to keep lines of communication open within their teams. And you and your organisation can use it for absolutely nothing.
One of the ways that Slack chat has separated itself from the growing crowd of collaborative tools is by its integrations. They take Slack from a simple online messenger to a fun, flexible and useful collaborator. There are a multitude of integrations available in the Slack app directory, but with over 150 options offered at last count, choosing worthwhile add-ons may be more of a headache than it’s worth.
Never fear, help is at hand.
Here are four of the very best Slack integrations available, which can turn an otherwise boring and limited work chat into a more vibrant and productive space.
Statsbot
If your team uses an analytics tool (and in this digital age, no matter what your business, they really should be), Statsbot is an excellent way to give your Slack team access to those all-important numbers.
Put simply, Statsbot integrates with both your analytics tool (whether you use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, New Relic or something else) and Slack, serving as a conduit to gain access to your stats. Whenever you want an update on the numbers, you simply ask Statsbot for it and it will deliver it to you instantly.
It’s a timesaver, cutting the need to open a new browser window, login to your analytics app and search for that number manually. What’s more, the app comes free and without any usage limits, so you’ll be neither out-of-pocket nor inhibited by overuse.
SocialWall.me
The perfect way to bring an otherwise internal application out into the open, SocialWall essentially gives Slack messenger a stage to perform on. It is the perfect way to give trapped communications a way to get in front of people’s eyes.
SocialWall.me may be best known as an event display app, giving conferences and music festivals a way to display social media content to their guests in a fun, engaging way. But now SocialWall has become Slack integrated, with both apps taking on a new lease of life. You can now use a Social Wall to highlight the best examples of work or play at any meeting or company event.
Whether it’s quickly collating good examples of work from Slack, or displaying the highlights of Slack’s in-built #random channel at the end of a weekly meeting, using SocialWall with Slack can help keep your employees abreast of the latest (and funniest) news from within your organisation.
Giphy
And speaking of fun and games, while you’re at it, add the Giphy integration to your list.
Sometimes a reaction can’t be described by simple text. And if a picture tells a thousand words, then a GIF is a veritable novel. The Giphy integration for Slack chat allows a user access to a world of reaction GIFs, so whether you’ve got yourself a ‘WOW’, ‘oh my god’, or ‘treat yo’self’ moment, there’ll be a GIF on hand to say what you may be unable to.
Giphy has millions of available GIFs, and they can be used to express yourself, set a maturity level for a particular Slack channel, or lighten the mood on a Monday morning.
Intro
‘The professional network for the messaging/conversation era’ is how Intro sells itself, meaning that it’s essentially a chat-based LinkedIn. But it is an absolutely perfect complement to an app like Slack.
When the app is installed it will instantly give your Slack profile a full list of members on your team, and it then creates a private network for each team by identifying team members’ social connections on Slack, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The app then makes it easy to source candidates for jobs, get introduced to new connections, and find new clients. And if you want to check whether a team member has a specific connection (a friend in Silicon Valley for example), you can find out instantly.
While much of Slack’s brilliance lies in its simplicity, by adding a few bits and pieces you can have a truly comprehensive example of collaborative software.
And you can have it without spending a cent.
