Since 2012, we’ve been committed to providing the best content marketing solutions in the industry, that enable brands to deliver more relevant content experiences to their audiences.
We’ve been working hard on our next round of updates, that allow you to continue to access the high-performing content you use to drive engagement, while also ensuring that content sourcing and delivery is more automated than ever before, giving you the tools you need to scale efficiently.
Security and compliance have always been a huge focus for StoryStream, and with Facebook and Instagram focusing on improving their data policies, we’ve adjusted how user generated content is made available to our customers. We’re excited to announce our latest features and improvements to your content workflows, and here’s what they look like so far.
Improved rights management for Instagram content
We’ve made some huge improvements in how customers get rights to use content sourced from an Instagram Hashtag Feed. These updates not only continue to ensure your marketing is always compliant with Instagram’s terms of use, but also make it quicker to deliver requests for usage rights at the source of content creation.
The changes mean:
- It’s now much easier to post your rights request message onto Instagram content.
- StoryStream is able to automatically mark content as Approved when an author responds.
- You can now upload a rights approval image to approved content, such as a screenshot of the author’s approval message.
The result is greater efficiency managing your content, with the StoryStream platform removing the manual work through automating previously time-consuming content admin.
While StoryStream has a log of all rights approvals, you can now also upload a screenshot of the approval in the new Rights tab, for all Instagram @mention and #hashtag content.
We’ll be extending this functionality in the future to allow you to choose the message for Instagram Mention and Twitter content.
Instagram posts with multiple images and videos now supported
Since Instagram and Twitter announced support for multiple image and video posts, brands have been using new, creative ways to deliver content experiences to their social media audiences using these features.
We’ve now made improvements to your feeds so that you can source and distribute any Instagram and Twitter content that includes multiple images and even videos, meaning interaction with the content on your website is just as rich as it is in the platform it was created!
Fully customisable Rights Request Messages
StoryStream customers typically see great approval rates for the rights to use user-generated content from Instagram and Twitter, and up until this point we’ve supported functionality for a variety of messages that can be sent to authors on social media, but there are some areas we want to enhance even further.
For example, it’s important that the way you communicate with your content creators is consistent with your brand tone and writing style.
We understand how important this is for our customers, and so we’re currently working on a way to offer greater flexibility when composing your Rights Request messages to content creators.
This means that as long as you’re including a hashtag that authors need to respond with, you can give your creators a much more personal, on-brand message, and even create messages in languages other than English.
We’re aiming to have this complete in the next few months, and we’ll send you an alert within the StoryStream interface when this functionality becomes available!
More SEO Improvements for article content
Consumers now have more ways than ever to reach and discover brands, so it’s increasingly important that the time and effort spent creating content for those valuable customers is optimised for organic search.
Search engines still remain a vital part of the decision-making process, especially for those customers at the top of the marketing funnel, so we want to make sure that the content you create in StoryStream is represented as much as possible in search results, ensuring you remain relevant and prominent when needed.
For this reason, we’ve extended our article creation tools, and improved our Storyboards to cater for better search engine indexing, so that those using the platform can more easily deliver optimised long-form content as part of their marketing strategy.
Canonical URLs for articles
The URL that is used for the page when articles are expanded will be updated to include the title of the article in the metadata of the page. As a result, this means there’s a higher likelihood that the article will be represented in search results and give your brand greater coverage against competitors.
Page titles
When articles are being read by visitors on your website pages, the original title of the webpage can now automatically update to also include the title of the article a customer is interested in. As with the canonical URLs, this also allows search engines like Google to treat it as a separate page of content on your domain.
SEO descriptions
Finally, meta descriptions can now be added directly to long-form content from our article creator tools, giving your content further chance of being surfaced by search engines and offering potential customers a more detailed summary of what your page is about when it does appear in search results.
All of the above contribute to the existing SEO benefits our content offers as a result of having regularly updated, dynamic content on pages where StoryStream is embedded.
The new SEO improvements are available now to all customers using our Digital Magazine solution within the platform, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
