Use it effectively and build stronger connections in your existing social media communities.
November 06, 2013

Use it effectively and build stronger connections in your existing social media communities.

Casey Fenton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

  • Archiving content from Twitter.
  • Aggregating content from multiple social media platforms.
  • Offering embed options to present social media content on websites, blogs, or pretty much anywhere on the web.
  • Building interest driven communities (i.e. aggregating a lot of information about a particular topic to engage a particular audience).
  • 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.
  • Storify has significantly increased the visibility of our social media channels. With the clean embedding options offered by Storify, we are able to present our social media activity on some of our more established channels (i.e. university websites). In turn, we can convert passive audiences into active ones.
  • Storify has really helped our constituents in the academic community embrace social media. By providing a space where social media conversations can be archived, Storify really turns social media conversations into spaces for collaborative note-taking. In short, it helped shift the perspective—making social media a tool instead of a distraction.
  • Storify helps us organize and, frankly, remember what we're doing in the social media space. It allows us to document and tell a compelling story about our social media efforts to senior decision makers and other internal constituents.
At this time, Storify is the only product that we've identified that offers the functionality we need: organizing, archiving, and embedding of our social media content. So I think it is highly likely that we will continue using Storify, at least in the near future. In the longer-term, I hope to see Storify expand its services to provide more functionality around live social media events.
Before using Storify, you need to ask yourself why. If you're looking for a hot new social media platform that is going to drive new audiences to your content, then Storify is not the solution. But, if you are looking for a way to organize your social media content, archive it, and present it on platforms across the Web, then Storify does that better than anyone. In the academic world, I think most of my colleagues should be on Storify; the key is that they get into it for the right reasons.