Are We Going to Ditch Slack for Facebook Workplace?

So it is official, Facebook Workplace (formerly known as Facebook for Work) is live and there are 1,000 companies using it. Unfortunately MtoM is not one of them, so I only know what others have told me. MtoM has been using Slack for almost a year now and it has considerably reduced our internal email and also lowered our company Facebook groups to one that barely gets used. Since we are a digital marketing agency that spends quite a bit of time on Facebook- posting for clients, running ads, monitoring influencer post- it only makes sense that it would be a place where we would also like to communicate as a company.

We have officially applied to spend more money (in addition to our ad spend) with Facebook and use Facebook Workplace but so far we are not a member of the elite 1,000. I am actually attracted to the price point- it is considerably less than Slack- at $3/month per active user (for up to 1,000 users). I currently pay $8/month per active user for Slack.

I am also attracted to the ease of sharing articles and images and videos with my team that I find on Facebook. I find it cumbersome to share them to our #industrynews channel on Slack and so I often share them to our underutilized Facebook Group. We spend a great deal of our time on Facebook and using it is part of our daily experience.

That being said, Slack has become a huge part of our daily experience also. It essentially took over for three tools- internal email, Facebook Group sharing, and Skype. We miss video chatting but have enjoyed the recent edition of voice calling on Slack. The MtoM team has also made the most of the various team channels, direct messaging, file storage, and fun extensions. I can’t tell you how many hours of laughter we have had over the random /giphy extension in the office. The Slack app is also very easy to use and keeps you connected when on the go.

I look forward to updating this post when we are provided a free trial of Facebook Workplace and I will keep you updated on our thoughts. I’m not sure if we will ditch Slack, but it will be interesting to test them side-by-side.