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Brands build online communities to improve customer satisfaction and retention and to gather customer feedback, according to one recent…

Why Slack is perfect for podcasters

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Brands build online communities to improve customer satisfaction and retention and to gather customer feedback, according to one recent study; the same is certainly true of podcasters. Yet so often, as a podcast producer or community manager, you likely find yourself hustling to get your listeners to engage with you online. As marketers, we’re so laser-focused on amping up the reach number on our Facebook posts and the CTR on our email newsletters we often forget that our online community should be inherently valuable to our listeners, not a system we have to game for the sake of vanity metrics.

Of course, if you find yourself on the hamster wheel of marketing metrics you’re not alone. You may have noticed, like many others, that driving reach or “engagement” online doesn’t seem to be improving your listener satisfaction or retention as you’d hoped. Not to mention, it can be painfully time-consuming to keep half a dozen channels up-to-date. Enter: Slack.

Slack vs. Traditional Online Marketing for Podcasters

If we had to guess, we’d assume you’ve tried at least a few of the following marketing tools for your podcast: a Facebook page for your community to gather, share their thoughts, and provide feedback; a Twitter account for listeners to get podcast updates and submit questions; an email newsletter to blast out your latest shows and ask for iTunes reviews; a blog or website to share bonus content from your show, like photos and links; Instagram, because…well, you’re not quite sure, but you heard you should do it.

While each of these channels does have its own benefits, trying to manage all of them — not to mention trying to get your community to connect with you on any, let alone all, of them — can be draining to say the least. This is why we love Slack. With purpose-driven channels, it can become you’re all-in-one marketing solution. It offers the opportunity to push out content (new shows), gather feedback, answer questions, and nurture real-time conversations that can fuel your show.

How Slack Can Help

If you’re not already familiar with Slack, here’s a quick primer. Slack is a communication platform initially built for work teams, which has now expanded to many other forms of communities. Once in the community, users have access to public channels, private channels, and one-to-one direct messaging, and as a community manager you have access to a host of nifty features to deepen your communication.

Why Slack Beats Other Community Platforms

We’ve written about this before (check out that post here), so we’ll keep this brief. Slack beats the other social media networks because it:

  • Offers both asynchronous and real-time communication
  • Filters out the trolls and lurkers
  • Focuses conversations on relevant topics
  • And, avoids distracting members with ads, “related” content, and notifications

But perhaps the greatest advantage it offers podcasters over traditional social media is that you can monetize your community. You may already know the pain of the annual plea for donations. By instead charging members a nominal fee to join your Slack community, you can provide ongoing value that builds on the existing content in your shows and drives listener engagement.

How Podcasters Can Monetize With Slack

You’re likely already offering your listeners enormous value outside your show — bonus content online, Q&As, and your precious time spent moderating conversations on social media. However, getting your quality content in front of your listeners can feel like fighting an uphill battle. Rumor has it, the big social media channels don’t want users to see your posts if you’re not paying to advertise. What’s a podcaster to do?

Provide tangible value in exchange for a nominal fee. Here are just a few excellent ways you can make your paid Slack community worthwhile for listeners.

Exclusive access to the livestream of your podcast: Share the link on Slack to a livestream of your podcast as you record. Take questions or comments from listeners in real time on a purpose-driven Slack channel. This is great for almost any podcast, but can be especially meaningful on educational or how-to podcasts. By joining your exclusive Slack community, dedicated listeners get a better shot of actually having their personal questions answered.

Weekly private call with the podcaster: Again, this is a great tool for anyone whose show has an educational bent or is hosted by (or hosts) a celebrity or in-demand personality. Exclusive, private access to the show’s host can be particularly beneficial for shy listeners who would never otherwise call or write in.

Access to special episodes and extras: Recorded an extra “short” or have some amazing product discount codes to share? Save them for your most dedicated listeners and offer them as a value-add on your Slack channel. (If you have advertisers, this can also be a value-add for them.)

Guest and host AMAs: Why not have your show guests drop in on the conversation now and then? You can set up pre-planned times for AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”) with the guest or host, or you can make yourself, as the host or producer, available full-time as an active community member. You may even find that some podcast guests will connect with the community so much that they’d like to join as a member, too. Now that’s some serious added value!

Access to bookmarks and private resources: Rather than providing all the show extras to the general public, keep those links, articles, full-text versions of interviews, photos, and more on your Slack channel. Slack also makes it easy for users to search for and find these resources after the fact.

Let users connect with one another: If you’ve got a special-interest show, you likely have a lot of amateur experts who listen to you (think: car buffs or sci-fi junkies). Help these folks connect in specialized Slack channels. For example, the Game of Thrones fans who listen to your sci-fi show might appreciate a channel for GoT theories and episode reactions.

Take Your Slack a Step Further

One of our favorite Slack features is all of the available integrations. Here are just a few that might benefit podcasters:

  • Kifi makes it a breeze for community members to find links previously shared in a channel. It keeps track of all the URLs and indexes the content of each page, allowing users to search the indexed content.
  • With the Twitter integration you can automatically share on Slack all tweets shared from a specific Twitter account. This means you can easily auto-post tweets like “check out the latest episode” without having to post on both platforms.
  • The Google Hangouts integration allows you to easily start voice or video calls with all members of a Slack channel. (Anyone who’s used the Google interface to start a large, semi-private video chat knows what a time-saver this can be.)

Needless to say, we think Slack can be an amazing tool for new or established podcast communities. It can help you provide added value to your listeners (replacing those annual “please donate” campaigns) and drive listener retention and engagement. If you’re ready to give it a go, we’d love to help.