Curating content from 19 sources
As you probably know, I’m a bit passionate about using the power of social media to bring communities together. I particularly enjoy using blogs to share engaging conversations with like minded people. For instance, I’ve recently been experimenting with creating a Norfolk Food and Drink community blog using Storify.
Storify is not an automated news scraper (unlike Paperli, which I use to curate stories about #VisitNorfolk and #VisitNorwich). Instead, you use it to manually pull together relevant social media content to illustrate your story.
I love the fact that Storify feels intuitive. The search function is easy to use and links to 19 sources. Other than asking for basic access to your social media accounts, the system doesn’t need much personal information.
5 steps to building a story
(For more details see our blog on LinkedIn Pulse on this subject)
- Add headings and text between content sourced from other platforms.
- Format text and add links.
- Use the Google Chrome extension called ‘bookmarklet’ to save social media updates when you see them
- Share your published story across social media accounts.
- Tell people whose social media updates you have included.
My new Storify – #Norfolk Food & Drink News
At this point I was hoping to show you what my first Storify looks like. However, when I used the ’embed’ function I could only get it to display text (and even then I had to edit the code to get it display the text correctly). This is the result:
“What’s cooking? Feast your eyes on #Norfolk Food & Drink News – July 2015”
Apparently WordPress.com hosted blogs “no longer support embed codes like these unless they come from “whitelisted” sources.” I had hoped it would display like an embedded tweet – as follows:
What’s cooking? Feast your eyes on #Norfolk Food & Drink News – July 2015 https://t.co/5C7czrqK7X Please RT Thank you.
— Huw Sayer – Writer ✒ (@HuwSayer) July 2, 2015
Please tell me what you think and share these points with your social media network. Thank you
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Thank you for reading
This is one in an occasional series of posts about social media and business communications. If you find them interesting or useful, please give them a star or five and share with others. I hope you will join the conversation by adding your views below or contacting me on twitter or Google+.
Kind regards
Huw
Huw Sayer 
Great and informative article. I’ve never heard of Storify so will try it out! Can you link to all social media platform’s? Keep up the good work.
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Hi Daryl
Thank you for joining the conversation. Yes, Storify links to most of the major social media platforms, as well as individual websites – and you can write supporting text between the posts (see our blog about this on LinkedIn). Although automation makes it easy to gather lots of content, a good editor should then select the most relevant pieces to tell a tight story.
Kind regards
Huw
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