My favorite aspect of working as an instructional designer is the creative work. I love writing branching scenarios, preparing presentations for conferences and webinars, and editing images for clients’ courses. I also enjoy testing out new software to see how I can best leverage it as a creative outlet. That’s why I had quite a bit of fun playing with Storify.
A blog post about the importance of incorporating social media into your company’s blog might have been relevant about 10 years ago (probably still behind the curve, honestly) so I’m not going to write that. What I will write about, however, is incorporating social media as a source of content into your company’s blog. Everyone knows that you should make your content easy to share on social media, but fewer companies draw upon content that exists in social media in its original format. The increasing importance of twitter in politics has caused major news companies to incorporate social media as a source of content, and it’s likely that other fields will follow suit.
Storify simplifies this process for writers. After you create an account, you can log into all your social media accounts to get easy access to social media content. Here’s what it looks like:
The text editor is on the left, and the twitter feed is on the right. I looked up my own twitter account, so my tweets appear in the search bar. Once I’ve located the tweet I want to include in the article, I simply click and drag it where I want it to appear.
Et voila! The tweet is in my blog post.
If you want to write about an important conversation happening on social media (for example, many conference attendees will tweet about their experiences and tag the conference), incorporating tweets in their original format will greatly illustrate your points. Use these sparingly, though: you’re writing a blog post, not a Buzzfeed listicle.
If you want to see what a Storify article looks like when it’s published, or you want to get a better look at the Instagram photo of Sylvie playing with her new laser pointer, check it out here.
If you want to hear more from Jenny, register for her upcoming webinar July 25th at 11:30am. Learn about failure’s role in game-based learning:
