Four Ways how Slack can Benefit your Business Here are the four aspects that anyone who is thinking of applying Slack to their businesses needs to know about its potential

Slack is an America-based cloud-driven company that allows businesses to stay connected. The company has been continuously growing since its inception in 2013. Since it's recent IPO announcement, it has been a large talking point for investors. But what is all the fuss? And what does Slack offer that emailing or other social media doesn't? Well, below are four aspects that anyone who is thinking of applying Slack to their businesses needs to know about its potential.

Your Employees Stay Connected with Each Other no Matter where they're Located

Not all businesses have all their employees grouped together in one location, especially with more home and online businesses sprouting, which allow freelancers to work for companies in other cities, states and other countries. If your business is run in a similar fashion — with employees spread all over the world — effective communication can be vital for the company to run smoothly. Slack allows employees to get and stay in touch and file sharing with fast as well as simple communication tools.

It's Easy to Use

Slack has taken many of the fundamentals of Facebook Messenger and applied it to a professional platform. Roughly, 45 per cent of the world's population uses social media now, which is about 366 million individuals. This means that there are a lot of people out there who understand how to use similar platforms just like Slack, and do so on a regular basis. Another great feature of Slack is that just like most popular social media platforms, Slack has an app that will allow you to receive updates and notifications directly to your mobile phone. Considering we are all spending more and more time on devices like our smartphones, Slack's message options can get a message to someone very effectively.

It can help Keep Employees out of Meeting Rooms

Due to the speed with which an employer can use Slack, it could mean that employees can stay out of meeting rooms and spend more time being productive. On average in the US there are over 11 million office meeting per day. Furthermore, an employee spends roughly five hours in a meeting per week and over four hours preparing for them, which is basically an entire day of work per week. Now, imagine if that time can be significantly reduced by the help of instant messaging, file sharing and group messages.

Furthermore, unlike meetings, whatever you discuss on Slack can be revised and added to for weeks on end. According to Slack's website "The best part of conducting any meeting in Slack is that when time is up, you'll have an entire written record of the session that can be reviewed by others and pasted or organized into any other documents."

Fewer Distractions

Over three million businesses actively use Facebook per day for not only advertising but also to communicate. This can be through group chats on Facebook Messenger or in private Facebook Groups. This is great when all your colleagues use Facebook but that isn't necessarily a good thing. By encouraging your employees to spend time on Facebook, you run the risk of them getting distracted by unrelated content on their news-feed or other messages. Slack allows all users to stay within the platform and not get distracted by other content that is unrelated to work. "Keeping up on what's important starts with the star feature," a snippet sourced from Slack's website.