Why Every Social Media Manager Should Get to Know Storify

Many people have heard about Storify and put it on a “to-do-once” list, dismissing it as just another Twitter app. If you’re one of them, whether a social media person, a journalist or the owner of a small niche website, now it’s time to learn it. Storify is a fantastic way to tell social media stories, and not just using Twitter, but also YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram… or Storify  itself, from your own, or from the other folks’ tweets and updates. If you’re still not seeing the opportunity, keep reading.

Why should you care about telling stories?

Storify allows you to pull content from your favorite social media, all around the web, and to transform it into a cohesive story with one, or multiple participants. The stories are easily embeddable and SEO friendly (they show up in SERP within hours from publishing), so you can choose to share them directly from Storify, or to embed them on your blog and share them from there. And you can “storify” anything: from natural disasters and social movements, to the events you’ve organized. Are you getting the picture now?

How to use Storify

Storify is the mother of content curation! You simply search through a social media of your choice (let’s say Twitter) for content related to your topic, pull out the interesting or important tweets that illustrate some parts of your story well, drag and drop them into Storify, write your headline, add some body text that leads the reader through the story – and that’s it! If you’d like to post it on your WordPress blog (both .com and .org), there’s a Storify plugin which allows you to publish stories with one push of a button.

And here are some ideas on how to use it in your social media marketing:

• If you’re hosting Twitter chats as a way to promote your business and interact with your fans, you can create transcripts of your tweets, or a summary of the chat and publish it on your blog. One thing to keep in mind: if you include more participants in your Storify summary, be sure to notify everyone you quoted – they will share it too (Storify is great for creating ego-baits).
• Invent a story! Choose a topic, search for the content you can use, and again – notify the participants if you want it to be shared. However, be careful with this, especially if you’re using tweets from persons you don’t know: make the story funny, but avoid anything that may seem insulting or rude to anyone involved.
• Cover events – conferences,  protests or even parties where there’s live tweeting. You can insert images, video, text from various sources, turning your story into a multimedia post that can easily go viral – once the story is published, the participants will thank you for the reference, and share it with their network.
• Shameless self-promotion: make a story from all the great things people are tweeting about you. You can use it if you’re launching a new product, if you know people are going to love it – after announcing it, you can use Storify to keep track of the comments and reactions, and turn it into another way of promoting your product and your brand.

Storify is easy and fun, and can be used in a lot of different ways. Just remember to put in enough background with your own content – after all, it’s about telling story; tweets and images alone aren’t enough to put the event into context, and you can easily make it look like a link dump. Well, just play with it, and see what happens.


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