Something that came up in our recent user research is that infrequent users often visit the site when someone shares a topic via Slack or email.
This led me to wonder what it would take to add some kind of prompt after a user posts to suggest that they share it in other channels where folks hang out that might be interested to read it or join the discussion.
I’m thinking something along the lines of the just-in-time prompts that come up during the process while a user is writing a post are great, but smaller and in/over the topic stream above or below the post they just created.
Has anyone tried anything like that before? How’d it work out?
There’s one channel where everything gets posted. But there are 1000s of channels. How do we get posts into the right channel(s)?
One way would be with tags. But that is kind of error-prone. People don’t know which channels are subscribed to which tags. And only the OP gets to tag something (topics are tagged, not posts).
Another may be the @group mention > slack post feature that @david’s new plugin supports. That seems like it could be worth trying out. It’s probably a closer fit to what we’ve heard draws people.
As a next step on that front, I may try setting up one channel per category so people who prefer Slack to email can choose which of those channels they want to join as their main way to “watch” a category.
But I suspect that the lack of automation is part of what is working today. Real people suggesting to particular groups (channels) that post X is worth looking at. Encouraging more of that is what I’m interested in here… (Perhaps the answer is just social, not technical, but if there were an easy way to try this out, I’d test it in the wild and see how it goes).