Crowdbooster was a tool to measure the success of Twitter and Facebook posts, with visualizations to track retweets, and track potential impressions created, likes, comments, and how many shares a Facebook post has received. Crowdbooster is no longer available.
$9
per month
Storify (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Storify was a social curation platform that collects updates from social networks, to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It was acquired by Adobe, and has been retired (May 2018).
Before recommending Crowdbooster, I'd want to know what goals they hope to accomplish with the software. Then I would want them to specifically identify what types of metrics would be most useful to their program. If they specifically need to report out on how many people in a certain location they reached, this isn't the right fit. If they are using other tools, there may be duplication. However, if they are currently using more budget-friendly solutions or just getting started with a new program, Crowdbooster is a perfect fit. It will help you to grow your program and is flexible enough to accommodate your needs.
I would advise that Storify is easy to use and includes many built-in resources, such as search tools, but that its application can be improved even more by combining it with other tools such as Google News (also accessible in Storify, but using standalone site is easy), Twitter (corporate and 3rd party) search tools and media management / "clipping" services like Vocus
Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.
In today's world, some stories break or even take place on social media. Storify allows journalists to easily curate these conversations about news and shape them into stories.
Storify's interface is easy to use and can be taught in minutes. My college journalism students take to it quickly and love working with it.
Storify can employ any social media that I can think of. If a story is being discussed in the social media world, you can find it in words, photos, videos, etc.
Telling stories through Storify is a creative process that I see becoming more prominent in the future.
Products you create in Storify are easy to embed or use for other purposes.
The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.
We like to live-tweet academic conferences and events. We think of it as collaborative note-taking. Storify is a great place to "file" these notes for later reference, but it falls a bit short as a place to go during the live-tweeted event. This is due to the fact that it is slow to refresh, if I add a tweet to the story, it can take up to a few minutes for it to appear for other users viewing that story. So we definitely use Storify in these events, but it's an after thought rather than an integrated part of the live activity.
Storify is not as powerful as other social media platforms when it comes to driving new audiences to our content. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + help us expand our networks. Storify is more functional as an organization tool that we can use to engage our existing network.
Each Storify story seems to exist in a silo. It does not make natural connections between stories that might be emerging around the same interest or topic. In academics for example, we have created Storify stories around the value of a Liberal Arts Education. It turns out that others were doing the same, but we only discovered that by accident; Storify was not connecting the dots for us.
Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies
Storify is worth it if you and your organization is creating a lot of social media buzz. If there are less than 15 people that are a part of the social media conversation, you really don't need to use this tool. It's most effective as an organizational storytelling tool, so you need to find a way to get people talking about you before you implement it.
I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.
From the day I first started using it, Storify has always made total sense. It's not the kind of product that forces you grit your teeth a lot or go into cumbersome customer support areas or fumble around forever only to be unhappy with the end result. I have been able to successfully use the product from the beginning
I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.
Practice makes perfect. The more often any new tool is used, the more comfortable the implementer is with the tool. Also, there is a natural tendency with any new tool, to want to use it a great deal. Identifying proper uses as they relate to your overall marketing goals is key to any decision to use a tool.
It is a platform that is singularly focused. It does not have a lot of the additions that come stock with other platforms such as robust reporting or deeper insights past schedule times. It is also a stand-alone platform and a lot of its primary functionality can be found in more encompassing platforms.
I addressed this in an earlier comment, but Storify is truly the best that I have found for displaying things in a narrative form. Other alternatives are more visually pleasing (like Tint, RebelMouse), but don't handle the narrative form so well. Those other platforms also do not display text only social posts quite as well.
Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.
My Storify stories ran the gamut of thousands of readers to a few dozen. That was on me as far as how engaging the content was/interest in the topic I came up with, probably the length of the Storify stories as well, and how much my stories were shared by others. Those reader numbers were not unique by the way, and unfortunately counted when I looked at my own story (even though I was logged in and they could tell it was me).
My objectives were to let people in on a narrative story they may have missed and to cement a passing social conversation into something more long-lasting. These Storify stories are now a part of a Tumblr blog and thus can be more easily accessed. Those aren't hard and fast numbers, but Storify helped me reach my objectives nonetheless.
As somewhat of a disclaimer, my use of Storify was not conducted for a client but as a social media experiment so I could interact with some digital transmedia storytelling. Storify was simply one piece of an integrated online persona. That being said, it was easy to track how many people had seen my Storify stories to see which were the most popular.
