A few personal tips on using Storify for content marketing

Storify front pageStorify is a great curation app that has a lovely interface for producing content around a conference, a topic, a breaking news story, a hashtag or a planned article. On my personal Storify, I've used it to collect funnies, round up conference conversation, links and reaction, cover live news and, most recently, document the joy and pain of working at a standup desk.

Today I did an hour's session introducing three digital marketers to Storify, running through some examples of how I use it personally and for the companies I work with.

We produced a Q&A as a test article, curating content to answer questions around taking up netball as a sport – see the embedded Storify below. But first, here are my tips I've gathered from creating content using Storify:

Storify tips

  1. Pro-actively think about your story, structure and angle before you start.
  2. Find a meaningful headline – for readers and for SEO.
  3. Add an intro – give some context and link to other content if relevant.
  4. Research/prep ahead – who might be the main commentators on this topic (sort them into a Twitter list that you can pull from), is there more than one hashtag in use, is there a structure you can use, e.g., a timeline, a Q&A, break into sections?
  5. Click off 'RTs' in the Twitter search function of Storify to reduce noise.
  6. Get to the point, ditch the pre-amble and edit out the waffle.
  7. Have a clear focus or angle for your story – don't overcomplicate.
  8. Don’t make it too long – no one will scroll through if you do.
  9. Note, you can set your chronology at the end – either oldest or most recent content first. (Not suitable if you've structured your story as we have here.)
  10. Add context later by adding titles or text explanations.
  11. Click on the Creative Commons option when adding images from Flickr – be respectful of copyrights.
  12. Use the 'Storify it' bookmarklet to search for content in a browser and send it to your Storify 'My collection' folder for later Storifying.
  13. Curate the sources you want to search from by clicking the + button in the sources panel.

Example

Here's what we produced in half an hour of training – not bad as a rough and ready article on the topic, and a whole lot faster and smoother than creating a whole text piece on the subject:

 

3 thoughts on “A few personal tips on using Storify for content marketing”

  1. Ooh, this is excellent, I'm going to add a link to it on my how-to about Storify that I put together a while ago (I'm sure you won't mind).

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