Sendible vs. Storify (discontinued)

I have a fairly straightforward use case for Sendible and it meets almost all of my needs. If you are a small company that needs a collaborative solution to social media content creation, and likely has a small team (or no team) to manage social media postings, I think Sendible is likely a great tool to schedule posts and largely automate social media marketing. A larger company or more involved marketing team could still use Sendible to schedule and collaborate on posts. However, there may be additional features they may want or need (like the ability to promote posts) that may not be available with Sendible.

Incentivized

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

• Easy to schedule and post to all of your social media platforms.
• Customer support is very accommodating and always there to help. I have never had an issue with reaching someone whether it was for a quick question or to demo other features.
• They have an awesome affiliate program (example: I earned over $600 from one company clicking through an signing up from my affiliate link - yay!)
• Compared to other social media platforms, Sendible has been the most robust with features and ease of use.
• They are always making advances and upgrades to their service offerings to better meet the needs of their customers.

• 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.

• Inbox. The inbox of incoming messages/posts is very clunky. Threads are separated into individual messages, making it difficult to follow conversations.
• Reporting. The included reporting features are limited and don't allow for enough customization to be worth using.
• Hashtags. When discussing the 10 most common mistakes (or whatever the title might be), we are unable to say "You won't believe #3" because the system reads this as a hashtag to link rather than just a number. It adds on editing time when approving posts.
• Default settings. As a Social Media Manager, it is annoying to have myself set as default when looking at the content calendar. I don't write the posts, just approved and schedule them, so manually entering in my writers' names in the filters could be made easier by making this an editable feature.
• Instagram. You cannot post multiple images in a single Instagram post from Sendible.
• Service Lists. They are supposed to be helpful in grouping your services (we do this by brand), however, these lists don't pull the information you put on individual services. So if I have a list with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for Brand A, you can't just add the Brand A Service List filter onto the calendar and see all of those posts that are scheduled. They don't seem to have much purpose at all.

Incentivized

• 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.

If I am given a larger budget to work with then I'd like a program that tracks and collects my PR hits, as well as sends me important info to respond to. I realy like the way New Brand Analytics tracks my Trip Advisor,etc ratings

Incentivized

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.

Sendible is 100% web based so managing social media platforms can be done from anywhere with internet connectivity. During registration, Sendible takes its users on a tour of its main features. The sleek design was engineered by professionals who have great interest in social media marketing. There is ample support in case users get lost and there is no learning curve.

Incentivized

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

Sendible has a great resource center which I have used multiple times throughout my year using the platform. There are plenty of troubleshooting articles and guides that make it easy to uncover the root of any small issues I may have.

Incentivized

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.

While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they keep the updates coming and optimize the platform a little

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It helps my business, to manage my clients social media.
• However I was hoping to capture more people who want to use the tool as DIY which has not happened.
• I do not want to let it go but it is currently more of an expense then bringing in a return.

Incentivized

• 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.