10 Slack Hacks to Boost Team Collaboration

Our team has been using Slack for internal communication and collaboration for about a month now. We love it — the platform is really easy to use, plus it integrates with a number of tools we use every day (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.). Here are a few of our favorite “Slack hacks” to boost collaboration and help us be even more productive:

1. Set certain Twitter accounts to feed directly into a specified Slack channel to monitor your clients, competitors or media/influencers.
2. Launch Google Hangouts within the app — especially helpful now that we have employees across the country!
3. Use Slackbot to manage your to-do list. Just type “/remind me to [task] at [time]” and (s)he will.
4. Create an IFTTT recipe that will post a daily/recurring reminder to a specific channel — e.g., to remind employees that a weekly meeting is about to start.
5. Customize your Slack color theme to match your company’s branding.
6. Message timestamps are essentially links to Slack’s archives, so you can copy, paste and share those links to reference old messages in current conversations.
7. Edit messages after you’ve sent them by clicking the gear icon (all the way to the right of the sent message), and then selecting “Edit.”
8. Bring your most important channels, groups, and private chats up to the top of the sidebar by starring them.
9. Lost your phone (or another device you use to access Slack)? No worries! Go to slack.com/account/reset to sign yourself out of Slack everywhere except the browser you’re currently using.
10. Remember these helpful keyboard shortcuts:
    1. Command + /  to pull up a list of all of Slack’s keyboard shortcuts.
    2. Shift + enter to start typing on a new line (within the same message).
    3. Shift + command + m to view all of your recent mentions.
    4. Shift + command + s to view all of your starred messages.
    5. Shift + command + esc to mark all unread messages as read.
    6. Command + k to jump from one conversation to another.

Are you using Slack? If so, what are some other tips and tricks that you’ve identified? Share them in the comments!

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Bonus read: Here are three more ways PR pros can use Slack to get more done — regardless of whether your team uses the tool or not!