Storify has been around for about eight years, but has perhaps taken a while to become mainstream. There are, however, good reasons for digital marketers to use it. Here are some ways it could be a useful part of your toolkit.
It allows you to pull together a story that happened using social media, whether it took ten minutes or ten months – We have reviewed how Wakelet is a good way of pulling together a Tweetchat after the event, but it can also be used to show how to achieve something, or explain the events surrounding a news story that has been running over a long period.
You can show what should have happened – Meetings and chats are not always logical. Tweetchats are even worse, because there’s no eye-catching or signalling that needs to happen before someone can comment. Tweets often come in out of any logical order. And people will often tweet about an event much later, adding to someone else’s live tweets. Wakelet allows you to sort this out, and tell the story logically and effectively.
You can add value by commenting effectively but briefly on several other posts at once – If there is a lot of content floating around about a particular event, you can add value by pulling it together into one place and giving it context. By adding your commentary, you can help others to understand the story, a process known as curation.
Wakelet will let you search for relevant content using keywords as well as hashtags – This means you don’t have to have seen the original content at the time, and you can also pick up content without a hashtag. Wakelet can be used both to find content, and drag and drop it into your storyline. In other words, it’s both a search and curation tool.
Use it to showcase your followers’ wisdom, and then share the result with them – Let’s face it, we all like being quoted. Ask your followers about something, and then use Wakelet to collect and curate their answers.
Wakelet makes it simple to curate sources from different media, and the result looks attractive – You can just add the link whether to Flickr photos, Twitter posts, videos from YouTube and so on. Wakelet allows you to draw on any source, and makes curation easy, even for those new to the process. And easy is always going to be good, because it takes less time – we find it is possible to curate 20 elements within 15 minutes.
You can summarise a long and involved discussion in a short and simple way – Because Wakelet allows you to include and exclude content at will, you can just include the most insightful posts and tweets about a particular topic. A discussion that has been going on for weeks on social media, and is getting a bit involved? Wakelet it, and pull out the key issues. You could even revive the whole conversation and give it new direction.
Wakelet stories can be commented on and embedded in other stories and sites – Wakelet is, therefore, a good engagement tool, because stories are easy to like, discuss and share further. Engagement and amplification are the essential goals of digital marketing, after all.
Wakelet is free – This means that it is very easy to try it out. All it will cost you is a bit of your time. And while time is money, it really doesn’t take very long to pull together a story, because it’s simple and easy to use. Surely you can spare a quarter of an hour? It could be one of the most useful things you’ve done all week.