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Facebook groups once hosted many of the top networking communities on the internet, but that may not necessarily be the case today. For accountants, Slack offers a formidable combination of features that make networking faster, easier, and more efficient.
In this post, we’ll dig into all the Slack advantages you’ll want to know and compare them to former fan favorite, Facebook. We’ll talk about what makes Slack unique, why it matters, and how you can optimize your experience with Room Tone, a Slack community built exclusively for production accounting and finance professionals.
The central feature of any Facebook group is the continuous, chronological feed that hosts its posts and comments. Group feeds gather all activity into one place, allowing members to scroll through the group’s entire history pixel by pixel, without a single extra click or keystroke.
The primary strength of the feed design is that it creates an easy way for members to interact with the group as whole. However, this advantage only comes at a distinct cost.
Facebook group feeds are inherently disorganized.
By comparison, Slack builds organization directly into the structure of its online communities. One of the many fundamental Slack advantages is the platform’s ability to host different channels for different conversations.
Let’s illustrate with a quick look at Room Tone.
Room Tone is a Slack community built by Wrapbook in partnership with Emily Rice of The List. The community is designed exclusively and explicitly for production accountants and finance professionals, which means that Room Tone must be able to host a wide variety of hyper-specific conversations among its members.
Channel functionality, along with a few other Slack advantages, ensures that Room Tone is flexible enough to cover any topic without ever losing the thread of basic organization.
On one channel, accountants and their peers can dig into the nitty gritty of compliance. On another, they can exchange tips and tricks for dealing with production incentives. Thanks to Slack, Room Tone makes it easy for members to jump into the right discussion at the right time.
The central feed of a Facebook group effectively represents a single thread of continuous conversation. While this may make it easier to check the pulse of the group at any given moment, it also makes it a whole lot harder to sustain meaningful conversations over time. Facebook group members are forced to cut through a river of constant noise to engage with one another in any substantial way.
On this issue, channel functionality adds another point to our list of Slack advantages. The ability to host multiple Slack channels within the same Slack community makes it easier for members to return to older conversations.
While that ability may seem simplistic at a glance, its practical benefits can be enormous. It empowers members to remain actively engaged with a community without pouring constant attention into it. For working production accountants on Room Tone, easier engagement with conversations on Slack means that it’s easier to learn, network, find jobs, and more.
In terms of engagement, Facebook groups are built for short-term value. They’re similar to physical bulletin boards, where community members can check out the latest news, conversations, debates, and – yes – memes.
There is, of course, value to this approach. A single glimpse at a healthy bulletin board will provide a strong idea of what’s happening within the community that owns it. Active Facebook groups grant their members an immediate sense of engagement.
However, while Facebook groups can be great for immediate engagement, their value fades in the long-term. Because conversations continuously drift further and further down the feed, important information and content tends to get lost in the ether. Basic questions are asked and answered repeatedly. The vibrancy of the community exists only in the fleeting “now”.
In contrast, Slack communities like Room Tone are built to harness both short and long-term value. Different channels play host to different, ongoing conversations. Rather than letting those conversations drift off into the void, however, the Slack platform preserves their value with its built-in search function.
Among the many Slack advantages discussed in this post, the search function is the most deceptively simple. On its own, it offers nothing new. In the context of a Slack community, however, it creates a surprisingly innovative experience. By making a community’s ongoing conversations searchable, Slack converts immediate social engagement into long-term institutional knowledge.
For example, imagine that you’re looking for information on maximizing production incentives as an accountant. In Room Tone, you don’t have to scroll through endless chatter or ask a question that someone has already asked a thousand times. Instead, you can simply search for appropriate keywords. The community piles on even more Slack advantages by enabling members to customize their search according to channel or message area.
The beauty of Slack is that it gives communities tools to foster both immediate and lasting engagement. By combining continuous conversation feeds with strong search functionality, Slack manages to capture the best of both worlds.
Facebook groups represent a closed ecosystem. For the community to work with tools outside of Facebook, members themselves must go outside of Facebook. When so many powerful digital tools are not only available but in common use, it’s difficult not to see this as a severe limitation. Facebook groups are inherently bound by the platform’s infrastructure (or lack thereof).
Slack, on the other hand, is a platform built for the modern professional. It is designed to integrate directly with a growing list of digital tools and services. Slack can connect directly to Zoom, Dropbox, Google Drive, digital calendars, project management software, and more.
Each of these integrations adds another point to our list of Slack advantages. They each expand the functionality of a Slack community in unique ways, far too many in total for us to capture in the space of a single, brief article.
Fortunately, they do share one meaningful characteristic. Every individual software integration further empowers Slack community members to customize their experience. Slack allows its users to personally optimize the way they engage with their online communities.
In case David Fincher didn’t already make it clear, Facebook is a social network. The platform was not designed with professional use in mind, and many of its features were built for distraction. Notifications, likes, and photo carousels are excellent tools for fostering engagement on a social network, but they can be counterproductive in a professional context.
Each of these features is a tool for grabbing attention. They’re designed to tempt your focus away from whatever you’re doing to instead explore Facebook. The social network presents its users with a continuous string of opportunities to click away from the task at hand.
Slack, however, is optimized for professional use. In this sense, many Slack advantages boil down to what the platform doesn’t have. There are no advertisements or friend suggestions. You won’t get pulled into a rabbit hole because you saw pictures of your old roommate’s new baby. Users can limit or even mute notifications from any Slack channels they find distracting.
Just like the Wrapbook project dashboard, Slack’s interface is streamlined, clean, and easy to use. It turns down the noise to prevent distractions. With Slack communities like Room Tone, you can stop fighting against an algorithm’s priorities and start focusing on your own.
Here at Wrapbook, we know a thing or two about data security. In our insatiably digital era, a platform’s ability to protect sensitive information is essential and non-negotiable.
That’s a huge part of why we chose to host Room Tone on Slack.
Slack boasts enterprise-grade data protection. The platform offers security at every level. Data is encrypted by default and further supported by state-of-the-art tools. Slack also offers identity and device management features to ensure that only the right people have access to your information.
Because Slack is designed for professional use, its digital security is likewise designed to meet professional standards. Slack’s security program has received multiple compliance certifications and can be further configured to meet an organization’s specific compliance requirements.
While top-notch data protection should be standard in all industries, we all know that’s not always the case. The ability to protect your information from bad actors is the final entry on our list of Slack advantages because it is so critical. Digital security is imperative for online communities in the twenty-first century.
Slack gives online communities the tools they need to supercharge their members’ experiences, a fact that makes the platform the perfect fit for Room Tone. Thanks in part to Slack, Room Tone is a one-stop shop for all things production accounting. It helps us give members of the accounting community everything they need for better networking, job searching, education, and more.
Room Tone is completely free and open to anyone in the production accounting industry. Apply now to start connecting with your peers and gain access to the many exclusive resources Room Tone has to offer.
At Wrapbook, we pride ourselves on providing outstanding free resources to producers and their crews, but this post is for informational purposes only as of the date above. The content on our website is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for legal, accounting, or tax advice. You should consult with your own legal, accounting, or tax advisors to determine how this general information may apply to your specific circumstances.
Loring is a Los Angeles-based writer, director, and creative producer. His work has been commissioned by a diverse range of clients- from Havas Worldwide to Wisecrack, inc.- and has been screened around the world. Through a background that blends project development with physical production across multiple formats, Loring has developed a uniquely eclectic skillset as a visual storyteller.
