Storehouse, the iOS-centric app for sharing stories from your photos and videos, now lets you tag friends in stories using the familiar ‘@-mention.’
In a world (read this in the trailer guy’s voice) where daily average users has become a better indicator of traction for social apps than everybody’s favorite metric, monthly actives, Storehouse’s focus on taking time to put some effort into crafting stories from shots taken while on an adventure doesn’t necessarily play into the same Facebook/Instagram/Twitter habit of checking and posting to the network every day.
Storehouse CEO Mark Kawano told TechCrunch last week that @-mentions should help increase daily engagement, with people returning to the app to see the stories their friends tagged them in and getting notifications when they get responses to their comments.
Leaving aside the metric side of things, introducing @-mentions is a small part of a broader shift at Storehouse, with the startup focusing on its consumer use cases. While publications like National Geographic still post on the platform from time to time, Kawano says the typical consumer use case they see is a person going on an adventure, like a trip to Hawaii. They do a few different big activities on that vacation, and in addition to posting individual photos to their primary social networks, they’ll create stories about snorkeling, about the hike to the volcano, about an awesome day at the beach.
Last month the app brought in 500,000 monthly actives, with stories getting read 22 million times. Those numbers don’t suggest very much engagement over the course of the month, so introducing more reasons to return could be a big boon for usage.