This post was originally published on the Parse.ly blog.
Newsrooms love Slack. The communications platform that’s taken the world by storm helps teams organize and share knowledge in real-time. One topic media teams love to talk about is how your audience is responding to your latest articles and stories.
We’ve made it easy to have conversations about audience data and analytics with our Slack integration. The Parse.ly Slackbot brings your real-time reader data directly into your Slack app. Ask the Slackbot which posts, authors, sections, or tags are popular right now or for the past day on your site, and you’ll get an immediate answer.
What Can The Parse.ly Slack Integration Do?
Once you set up the Parse.ly Slack integration in a channel, any user in that channel can request the data from the associated account. We’re using the real-time data our API provides, so you do have to have API access to use this Slack integration.
Ask the Parse.ly Slackbot to return top posts in the last hour or day. Each request specifies what you want to see and the time frame you are requesting.
You can ask about top referrers, authors, sections, and tags for any timeframe within the previous 24 hours. Want the top posts in the last 15 minutes?
/parsely posts, 15m
You can automatically ping your team with that data. Celebrate a story that reached a large audience or congratulate today’s top author!
/parsely authors, today
If you see something worth diving into the dashboard for, every result is linked, so you don’t have to go searching for it to learn more.
See more commands and instructions here.
Alerts with the Parse.ly Slack Integration
In addition to requesting the top results, you can set your Parse.ly Slackbot to alert you to posts that are getting more attention than usual, so your team doesn’t miss any chance to engage with your audience in real-time.
Parse.ly’s Slackbot allows users to set a custom pageview threshold, so your channel will be alerted immediately with any stories that go above the threshold. Your team won’t lose any time; you’ll see trending posts right away so you can respond more quickly.
Make the Slackbot Your Own: An Open Source Project
Finally, our Slackbot is open source! True to our open-source-loving nature, we’ve made the code available to the community — so you can contribute to make the Slackbot better, or simply make some minor modifications for your own use cases.
Slack teams are designed to be flexible, dynamic, and value-adding, and we have applied those same principles to our Slack integration, as well. You control the data you need and send it to the teams who need it, when they need it — a seamless integration between the deep diving you do in the Parse.ly dashboard every day and the quick, broad-level actionable insights you need from your Slack channel.
The Parse.ly Slackbot beta repository is now public, and you can find it here:
https://github.com/Parsely/slackbot
Look for documentation on installing and hosting it here:
https://github.com/Parsely/slackbot/blob/master/README.rst
Alexander is Technical Success Manager at Parse.ly. He is a New Jersey native who is currently living in Bonn, Germany. He attended Colgate University and later Trinity College, Dublin, earning a masters in literature. He went on to become a freelance ghostwriter and web designer, where he gained a diverse technical skillset that allows him to augment the capabilities of the customer success team. He enjoys reading and writing fiction, playing video games, and writing open source tools for said video games.