Breaking free from Social Media Stories – have a look at StorifyMe!

[svenhaiges]

Last week, Erica and me interviewed StorifyMe Founder Nemanja Popovic for our Labs Talk podcast. As we do with all topics we talk about, we’ve taken a closer look at StorifyMe. Nemanja was kind enough to set us up with free accounts, so we both had a chance to use their story editor and all features they offer also in the paid plans – thx so much Nemanja! In this blog post, I’d like to give you a quick written overview of our learnings and understanding of StorifyMe. Be sure to also listen to our podcast episode, too, which I’ll include again below.

This post was originally published at SAP Customer Experience Labs Blog.

What’s a story, really?

Of course the real question should be: what are stories on Social Media?! We all know Instagram from Facebook, that’s where the story format appeared and many millions of users are creating stories using Instagram on a daily basis. So a story is a sequence of screens, typically in portrait format, filled with with meaningful, quick and concise content. You can have screens auto-advance to the next so users can simply lay back and watch, or you can make them actively tap onto the screen to get to the next one. On each screen, you can place a variety of elements – ranging from text/images/videos to interactive elements such as questionnaires, polls or Call-To-Action buttons.

Breaking free

These stories are typically buried into the apps such as the Instagram on your phone or only visible within the walled gardens of Facebook on the Web. For me and in an essence, this is what StorifyMe is all about: taking the stories out of social media walled gardens, making them accessible to your web pages, you mobile sites or available in-physical stores via QR codes that link to these stories. The StorifyMe editor, shown below, allows it’s users to create engaging stories that can then be freely shared across all kind of social media platforms – LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook – or just simply link to them from some blog posts on the web.

So here’s the web URL to the story shown in the editor above. You can share it freely to whatever platform you like. Using the OpenGraph Meta Tags (have a look at my recent blog post here), the moment such a story is shared on Twitter, it will be turned into a richer Twitter preview card, way more engaging that regular plain text links.

Via the StorifyMe Platform, you can of course track all interactions with the stories. Below is just part of their analytics offerings, showing the story views per story, the desktop/mobile split, countries and the top visited CTA (Call-To-Action) URLs.

You can dig deeper into the details of each stories’ analytics, too. Below you can see what’s available – such as the number of slide/screen views, the drop-off between each slide and fianlly the clicks on the CTA button of that story.

As also covered in our podcast episode with Nemanja, they have now integrations available for SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Upscale – an outcome of being part of the SAP.iO Foundry Munich cohort. Via these integrations, you can quickly share these stories to your commerce site in an easy and painless fashion.

But of course, taking the stories out to the web, has a few drawbacks, too. For example, as Instagram does not allow 3rd parties to create a story via an API, the only way to export a StorifyMe story to Instagram is via screen-by-screen image exports. Compared to the typically rich and dynamic contenet of an Instagram story, that’s of course quite a drawback. On the other hand, by creating a universally viewable story on the web, via StorifyMe, you gain the freedom to share a story pretty much wherever you like.

The verdict

I guess you have to try it yourself and see if stories off the beaten path and on the web work for you. When it comes to Labs Talk, we”ll be creating a story for each episode going forward because we believe it is a great way of providing richer, more engaging content to our Tweets, LinkedIn posts and also to our blog posts. Part of our research we do for each Labs Talk Podcast episode creates content that can very easily be turned into a story attracting even more listeners and subscribers.