Likelihood to Recommend The free version is more than enough for personal use. But if you have a small business or if you're trying to grow your brand, it's better to use one of the premium plans. It's worth it. Later is especially useful if you manage multiple accounts for multiple brands/companies because you'll be managing everything with just one tool
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Later's easy upload feature (drag and drop) is incredibly helpful, especially for multiple images and videos. The drag and drop option for scheduling content is easy, and images and videos load rather quickly depending on size. Captions can be saved if there are posts or common phrases that repeated and shared out from the content. Alexis Ramsey Senior Marketing Account Supervisor, Digital Strategy
Read full review 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. Read full review Cons I wish I could edit the look and feel of my pictures within Later a little easier. There are standard filters, but for brand sake, I need everything to be consistent. I wish there was a direct integration with things like Canva and Lightroom to make uploading and editing my images seamless. The biggest thing I wish Later did was allowing a better threshold for the free accounts. All of the helpful and useful features are for paid only (video posts, multi-image posts, analytics, etc). I can't justify the cost for just a few posts a month. I end up doing all of the video and multi-image posts manually, which lately has me questioning the benefit of Later's free version as a small business. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability Later is extremely easy to use. I love the visual planner portion of the tool so I can see ahead of time what my images will look like next to and stacked amongst each other! The posts are so easy to set up, tag, and schedule. UX and UI are great!
Read full review 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
Read full review Support Rating Later are not just a software tool, they also provide marketing advice, tips, and tutorials via their blog. I’ve only had to reach out to them for help a few times and have found them to respond much faster than other tools in their category. I receive weekly emails with updates, marketing tips and invites to online events. I look forward to their emails as I’ve learned a lot of things that I’ve been able to actually implement.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I went with Later for the lower cost subscription. The
Hootsuite copy features is missed, but Later has hashtag suggestions which is nice. I really need something to post across multiple platforms. I also needed the ability to schedule more than the 5 free scheduled posts offered by
Hootsuite . Later has been working great for what I need it to do to support my small event promotion business.
Read full review 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.
Doug Meffley Director of Athletics Digital and Social Communications
Read full review Return on Investment Increased social media involvement - Since utilizing Later and another social media scheduling tool, we have seen our growth rise as much as 12% in just a few months. This includes followers, likes, and engagement. This is huge for us since social media is a great way to generate new customers and increase brand awareness. Easier reporting - Analytics tools on most of the big three (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) are pretty limited. Later is a great way to take a look at our Analytics, and it makes it easy to understand the numbers. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots