GroupTweet (discontinued) vs. Shorthand

GroupTweet will work well for any brand that needs to extend their message through advocates authorized by GroupTweet. Our media company, The Breaking News Network, is the largest hyperlocal media network devoted to social good, and unique in providing a way for any community newsmaker to get their word out through our city feeds. Over 4,000 Twitter feeds - for example, city politicians, civic groups, nonprofits and performing arts organizations - are authorized to share content on our 400 city feeds.

Shorthand is ideally suited to visual stories where you have a good number of images and/or embeds or video to include. It is well-suited to long-form stories, where you wish to keep the readers' attention longer than usual. It can help to differentiate particularly important or intriguing stories from others on your website - and for this reason, it could be used as a premium content tool, perhaps for subscribers. It can also be used to showcase stories about awards you've organised, giving them special treatment. It is less suited to breaking news, or very time-sensitive news stories, as it can take some time to prepare, post or update shorthand stories. And it doesn't work well for stories with strong accompanying imagery

Incentivized

• Since Twitter is a vehicle for breaking news, our correspondents in each of our 400 cities uses a simple hashtag to syndicate their local news and events. It is simple to use and correspondents don't have to do anything differently to share their messages across our city feeds.
• We can mobilize our correspondents to collectively promote news and events that impact the public good. For example, we can develop advocate networks to support initiatives like crowdfunding campaigns

• Enabling visual storytelling with multiple pictures
• Embedding rich media within a story, including video
• Engaging readers for longer than average dwell times
• Making it easy to create striking article design without coding experience

Incentivized

• GroupTweet would be awesome if the service for collaboratively distributing info extended to Facebook, G+ and other social networks. However, that's probably something out of their control to develop.

• Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
• Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
• Adding additional section templates could speed up design
• More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful

Incentivized

GroupTweet is simply the best way to syndicate messages across Twitter. It takes time to build the foundation of authorized users, but once the user base understood the power we provided to get their message out, it has become institutionally utilized.

I have never known it to be down during my use of it. All you require is an internet connection to log in and you can use it on multiple devices. Adding ease of accessibility, there are simple ways to log in. I've also never known a Shorthand story to go down once live on our site.

Incentivized

Due to the integration with our content management software, there is a short delay on our site while it loads, which may cause some readers to drift away. However, I've seen other sites where it instantly loads articles, so I believe this to be down to the content management software behind our site more than Shorthand itself. Once that brief initial period is over, it doesn't require additional loading time.

Incentivized

There is no other product like GroupTweet! It is simple and takes no extra resources to use it, just add a hashtag. We are unusual in that we use GroupTweet for over 400 Twitter accounts. It would also work well for single accounts with a number of collaborative users.

As a web-based service, it is easy for users to log into from anywhere. Content can easily be shared, as you can set up teams that enable access to each other's work as required. And content can be reviewed by others before publication using the sharing function. You can also view how an article will look on different devices.

Incentivized

• Since The Breaking News Network is noncommercial, we use GroupTweet to extend our facility to support the community by functioning as Twitter based bulletin boards. By offering a free and valuable service to the community instead of a pushy sales person trying to sell advertising, we create a lot of good will.
• In the future, we will use GroupTweet to get advocate networks to support crowdfunding initiatives we bring forward with our new crowdfunding marketing company, BNN Funding. For more information on how we develop massive advocate networks, BNNFunding.com

• Helped us create one of our top 10 most-read and most-shared stories in the last year
• Enabled us to elevate key pieces of content, boosting dwell time on our site
• But can also be time-consuming to adopt for some stories, meaning you need to choose well what stories really deserve the investment in time
• Boosted collaboration between teams via its ability to share, including offering the chance for others to preview content prior to publication

Incentivized