Here’s a short tutorial and description of the way cool paper.li service, a useful social media add-on that creates a custom paper/newsletter from your Twitter account and can also harvest data from RSS feeds and facebook.
Chances are that if you’re on Twitter that you’ve seen updates that mention something to the effect of a paper.li or daily twitter update. This coming in the form of a summary of tweets from someone you follow on Twitter. This is accomplished by a very cool Twitter add on known as paper.li (see http://paper.li/)
At first you might think, "oh, big deal looks like another robot that harvests Twitter data". Well, perhaps it is, however, paper.li has gained loads of attention recently and has become a social media marketing person’s dream tool. Simple in concept, paper.li does an amazing job at summarizing and synthesizing tweets into a very appealing newspaper styled summary product – provided that you’ve carefully assigned all the publishing variables correctly.
Here’s how it works. First you’ll need to have a list or perhaps a favorite hashtag on twitter that produces excellent quality – note: be sure to use a list or tag that isn’t bombarded by off-topic dribble or is infiltrated by twitter spammers… the last thing you want is for your paper.li to contain off topic ramblings as this can quickly damage your online reputation or credibility. Using the paper.li setup tools you then define the parameters of your paper, this is done by assigning a hashtag, list, or even individual twitter account that will be used to generate your paper. For the purpose of his article we’ll assume that you want to create a paper from a list – in my mind this is the most useful and popular use of paper.li. Once you assign where the content will be coming from (a twitter list in this case) then, as the publisher, you determine the frequency of your paper (daily, twice per day, or weekly), set the publishing language, assign a descriptive title, select from a list of topics that will be culled from the tweets. Note, your paper can scrape tweets from any individual twitter account (for example, a daily summary of your tweets), a hashtag, keyword search, and can even pull a keyword search from facebook or include an RSS feed of related content as well. Once created you can also customize your paper.li with a custom background image for branding purposes. Other optional settings that you have control over include: time of day (or day of week) to publish; post to twitter when a new release has been published,
Keep in mind, as a publisher you also have access to a handy embeddable widget to promote your paper.li – see example below:
The finished product will be available online for all to view and will be automatically updated at the set interval. Users of paper.li will also have the option to subscribe to your paper and receive a very friendly html version via email – highly suggested. Additionally, once created, paper.li will automatically tweet an update and link to your paper and the tweet will also include several @usernames of people mentioned in your paper – people love these mentions! See this new paper.li I just created that provides a summary of activity from the B.C, Canada GIS / Geo tech community
Via my Twitter account @gletham I’ve authored several interesting paper.li updates. You can see them all HERE
A couple of good summaries you might enjoy include:
- Geo Innovators – news updates from some of the top GIS/Geo minds around
- GIS Companies Daily – an update from leading GIS companies on Twitter
- The Esri Tweets Daily – A daily summary all about Esri
So, what kind of paper.li products could a GIS company or GeoGeek want to create:
Group your company twitter accounts into a list and create a corporate twitter summary
Create a list of some of your best clients that are on twitter and generate a weekly update to share
Create a special event hashtag for use at an event then generate a daily paper.li to summarize the activities and tweets from the event.
