Preserve, archive and share selected social media interactions of your choosing by building a custom timeline with the excellent free Storify tool. Set up an account, create a new “Story” and immediately begin recreating your favourite experiences.
Social networks suported include Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Flickr, Soundcloud and Tumblr, with the additional options of embedding URLs, RSS items and Disqus comments.
There are dozens of uses for Storify, such as customer service support, testimonials, opinion pieces, blogging links, news reporting and live discussions.
By easily searching for, dragging and dropping content to your Storify timeline, you can quickly publish your story and notify those who have been included.
How Small Businesses Can Use Storify
You could be creative in how you choose to use Storify for your business. Here’s a few ideas:
- Client testimonials on social networks about your services
- News stories helpful or relevant to your clients/audience
- Customer service, tutorials and troubleshooting
- Community hashtag discussions
Seth Godin published a blog that summarises why I use Storify myself. Here’s what he said:
Amplifying social proof
Trust is the biggest hurdle.
And trust largely comes from social proof.
Is everyone doing this?
Is it safe?
Will I be embarrassed/ridiculed/left out/left behind/feel stupid?
Social proof shares a word with social networks, but they’re only loosely related.
Social proof is the story we end up believing.
Your job as a marketer, then, is to take the threads of social proof and weave them together into something powerful.
No, you can’t fake this (and shouldn’t try). But you can amplify it. You can focus the proof on a tiny cohort, so that it has more impact. You can invest in media that acts as a megaphone, multiplying the impact of the proof you already have.
One way to be trusted is to trust the people you seek to serve.
Mostly, you can work to build something that’s worth trusting.
How to Use Storify for a Twitter Tweet Chat
Every Tuesday at 9pm I host a Twitter chat about small business issues called #SmallBizHour. Storify is used to grab the best tweets and organise them into a linear timeline.
Below is a video showing how this is done, including some of the lesser known tricks to using Storify.
In the video I mentioned the Google Chrome extension for Storify which has been documented by Storify themselves if you want to see how to use it.