Paper.li Lets You Control Your Twitter News Daily

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Your Paper.li Twitter News Daily Just Got Better

Paper.li Twitter Daily

Just to recap, Paper.li is a free Twitter service from Small Rivers that allows you to create an online newspaper of your Tweets. Not to long ago, Facebook updates (based on keywords) were added to the mix but the latest news is even more exciting.  The announcement came last week that new features have been added that put you in control of the content shared on your Paper.li Daily Newspaper. Let's take a look at the new features in this screencast I recorded called:

Paper.li Twitter News on Basic Blog Tips

Here's what I cover in the video:

  1. New Publisher Profiles – add Twitter profile branding
  2. Editorial Controls – including deleting unwanted stories and users (Woohoo!!)
  3. Article Tracker – provides social sharing profile of the article
  4. Paper Settings – lets you publish more often and add a custom background

Small Rivers also beefed up their Advisory Board by recruiting Eric Hippeau, CEO of the Huffington Post, to work alongside Guy Kawasaki and with that move I'm sure they will continue to dominate the playing field.

Your Thoughts on Paper.li

I'm pleased to see the growth and development of this powerful Twitter curation tool. This gives us greater control so that we can eliminate stale or inappropriate news, while at the same time we can bring more attention to the stories we care about most. I'd like to hear what you think about these enhancements and do you have plans to publish a Paper.li today?

86 thoughts on “Paper.li Lets You Control Your Twitter News Daily”

  1. Devesh

    Ileane,

    Great tool. I keep seeing people mentioning about this tool on Twitter. I’m yet to start using it. Will defiantly going to try in near future.

    Thanks for sharing this great post. Tweeted.. !

    Have a great weekend.

    1. Ileane

      Devesh, if you have a lot of Twitter lists, Paper.li is a great way to keep track of the top stories. I have a Twitter list for Blokube and I created a Paper.li for it. Thanks for stopping by Devesh!

      2. Ilka Flood

        Hi Ileane,

        Just read about your Twitter list for Blokube. Can you get more into detail about that? How did you do that? I have a lot of friends over at Blokube and it would be great if I could tweet their content setting up a Paper.li 🙂

        Thanks!

        Ilka

        1. Ileane

          Ilka, I do it the hard way 🙂 I add each person to the list as I find out that they members of Blokube.
          I’m sure that I’m missing a few members, because I haven’t met everyone yet. Here’s my Blokube Twitter list http://twitter.com/#!/Ileane/blokube but you are perfectly welcome to start your own. I also have a list for Blog Engage members http://twitter.com/#!/Ileane/blogengage and I think Karen @BlazingMinds has a Twitter list for BE as well. Hope you find some new Tweeple that you’re interested in following. 🙂

  4. Vernessa Taylor

    Hi Ileane,

    Now this is starting to look like fun! That was a thorough walk-through of Paper.li’s new (and awesome) features. As I said in my BK comment, I like the idea of Paper.li but the lack of editorial controls made it easy to pass on this Twitter tool.

    Thanks for the video (and write-up). Do you suppose Paper.li is trying to dominate the online newspaper field and turn us all into the generation of roving reporters? 😀

    1. Ileane

      Hey Vernessa, LOL!! I think Twitter has already turned us into a generation of roving reporters. Paper.li just puts all our stories in a gift-wrapped box, tied it up with cute little a ribbon 🙂

      1. Vernessa Taylor

        Haha, how right you are! Nothing like gifts, even when it’s not your birthday. 🙂 I’ll be pulling this one out the box … soon.

  5. Jane

    Hi Ileane,

    I use Paper.li, but I cannot say that I am using it effectively. I just set it up and forgot. Whenever a daily is published I give out a custom shout at Twitter with @ mentions of those invoved. Will try out the new features involved.

    Jane.

    1. Ileane

      Jane, I think now is the time for you to check out Paper.li. With these added control features they can only serve to help improve engagement and discovery.

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  7. Bodynsoil

    I am so happy to see this improvement, I tried Paper.li once but found that the content they chose didn’t mesh well with my message and I wouldn’t publish to my feed. I think being able to delete articles that aren’t of interest to you is a very important change and they should see their usage dramatically increase as a result.

    Thank you for bringing this to my attention as I hadn’t read the updates.

    1. Ileane

      Hey Janet, remember now that you can combine more that one Twitter account with multiple hashtags, your Paper.li has got to be a winner! Let the game begin 🙂

  8. Evelyn

    Hi Ileane,

    Thanks for sharing this!

    I have my paper set up for weekly. There was a time, when I wanted to delete stories, but couldn’t. I ended up removing that person from my list. I’m glad to know now that we have the option to delete the stories.

    These are some very nice features and I can’t wait to play around with the features.

    Take care,

    Evelyn

    1. Ileane

      Hey Evelyn, so nice to see you 🙂
      Great idea to publish Paper.li only once a week too. Let me know how your next edition turns out.

  9. James Pruitt

    this is great news. I have used it, but just haven’t explored all the options yet. thanks Ileane. got to go work on mine. I didn’t know there were so many options available.

    1. Ileane

      Go ahead and set them up for all your niche sites too, just by using the hashtag and keyword features. That was you can find popular stories to follow on Twitter and Fan Pages on Facebook – hey I just thought of that one 🙂

  10. Alex

    Brilliant Ileane!

    I’ve always been curious about this paper.li thing but never found the time to look into it.

    Now I don’t have to!
    Thanks so much for creating such a good resource for anyone wanting to set this up.

    Tweeted and voted at Blokube 🙂

      1. Brankica

        Alex says “Now I don’t have to!” Is he telling us he will not look into it and we suck cause we are using it? 😉

        1. Ileane

          Naw!!! He wouldn’t do that 🙂 didn’t you hear him say “brilliant” (I know I keep bringing that up, right?) LOL!!

  12. Fred Leo

    Hi Ilene,

    I think that paper.li looks like a cool tool for personal consumption of content, but I really don’t like how it sends out automatic tweets telling people about the papers. Because the papers are really curated, it just doesn’t interest me.

    What are others’ thoughts on reading other peoples’ paper.li papers?

    1. Ileane

      Hi Fred, there’s an easy way to get around that. You can go into your paper settings and turn off auto tweeting. Here’s a screenshot, of where to make the change in Paper.li
      Paper.li settings

  13. Candy

    This is pretty cool if you had a decet followership you can really show them that you are making an effort if you pu something like this together for them at a specil ocasion like christmas etc.

    1. Ileane

      Hi Candy, that’s a great idea. Just build your Paper.li based on a keyword or hashtag like #FathersDay for example and you can share all the good stories on that day. Remember it’s easy to get rid of the stuff you don’t like now. I might try that one soon 🙂

  14. Brankica

    Just what I needed Ileane, I hated when it picks up just random stuff, although I know it was my fault cause I had no clue how to set it up. I am going to set all this properly and even create the papers for my niche site 🙂 Thanks a bunch!

    1. Ileane

      Brankica, it was never your fault that odd things appeared in your Paper.li – but from now on it will be 🙂 LOL!!
      Have fun girl. I can’t wait to see what creative daily’s you can create now that you know how to tweak it to your advantage. Cheers!

  15. Dennis Edell

    The last time I ie to read one, I was nothing but confused; I hope it really has gotten better.

    1. Ileane

      Dennis, I noticed before that some of the stories that appeared on the Twitter newspaper pulled the wrong image or story summary – similar to the way Facebook does 80% of the time. So it can get confusing if your reading a headline and the story doesn’t match.
      That’s why I’m so glad we can delete those little buggers now, and issue a clean easy to understand Twitter newspaper. 🙂

  16. Chris Nash

    I’ve always had a big problem with paper.li – and the myriad of automated tools just like it. Quite simply, the problem is it’s automated, no matter how many settings you give it. The content and the publishing is being done by a robot.

    If it’s not worth a human being’s time to write, is it really worth a human being’s time to read?

    1. Ileane

      Chris, I think there is a misunderstanding about Paper.li – I know you’re a Twitter user so I’ll explain it this way. Just take a look at the Twitter bio of @SmallRivers

      Creator of paper.li or how to read any Twitter stream as a daily newspaper

      All Paper.li does is take stories from your Twitter stream (or someone else’s) and display it like a newspaper style format. Paper.li doesn’t write anything – except the code to extract the metadata from the Tweets I guess.

      I’m not sure what you mean when you say that the content is “being done by a robot”.

  17. Chris Nash

    Another issue I’ve had with it – and this is probably more significant – is attribution. On more than one occasion I’ve written something, to have it retweeted or mentioned by someone else – and one of their followers has generated a paper.li paper from *their* feed. Then the robot has happily mentioned “top stories” from our person in the middle, who, depending on their ethics, has either had to embarrasedly explain that, no, they didn’t write that. Or not.

    Humans check their sources. Robots do not.

    1. Ileane

      Chris, how is that any different from the rest of Twitter? People Tweet links all the time without saying where they come from. Haven’t you ever done that? An easy way that happens for me is when people don’t have their Tweetmeme settings configured correctly with their Twitter account.

      What I learned when I recorded this video is that we can look at the new Article Tracker feature to see all of the other Paper.li’s that our articles appear in. I think that’s pretty cool; don’t you agree?

  18. Ju

    Hey Ileane, you just put up some good information here, I didn’t even know about paper.li before. They look interesting and I’m gonna try them now.

  19. Extreme John

    Ahhh Paper.li, excellent recap of the new features Ileane, all though I don’t think Paper.li is something I can get involved in. Sad part is it’s probably not even really Paper.li’s fault, it’s the users that already have no clue how to use Twitter that jump on and use Paper.li and do nothing more then send out annoying tweets @mentions to people included in their paper or whatever it is. By far one of the most annoying Twitter tools I’ve seen come out, I’ve been know to block users using Paper.li that send the “my daily crap is out” tweets.

    Truth is, if I’m following someone on Twitter and I read their blog, interact by retweeting and commenting, the last thing I need is that same blogger mentioning me in their “daily” coming out. I’ve never clicked one, read one, or even responded to one.

    It might seem a little whinney but imagine connecting with let’s say 12 different bloggers that use Paper.li and have no clue. That means 12 extra times a day that my cell phone goes off with an @mention and it’s one of those things.

    I’m happy to see there are so many that like Paper.li and find something useful from it, it’s just not my glass of beer.

  20. Ileane

    Hey Kavita, if you have any questions, feel free to ask away! You know I love Twitter questions (it’s the Facebook questions that leave me baffled and screaming for help from my friends).

  21. Ileane

    Oh goodness John – there’s no way I would ever connect Twitter to my phone. LOL!! Well since I don’t even get on the internet with my phone you can just imagine why I can’t relate to that situation (I know, I need to get a smart phone one day).

    Let me ask you this – does it bother you when the phone goes off whenever someone just retweets your latest post? What about people that have you on Twitterfeed? I bet that gets annoying too. Am I right?

    Have a good day John, thanks for your input, that was a really interesting take on it.

    1. Brankica

      One thing that might not be 100% accurate to what John said. I believe 99% of people just automate their paper, without ever sending personalized @mention. Out of those 12 people you might be mentioned in 1 maybe 2 cases.

      Paper.li tweets one tweet a day and mentions 3, 4 people in it (can’t fit more in a tweet). I randomly chooses people, so there is slim chance you will be picked up by all 12 🙂

  22. Jeevanjacobjohn

    Hey Ms.Ileane,

    First of all, thank yo for the awesome article and video. I am glad to know that paper.li has rolled out some new features. I agree with what John said above. Paper.li is a great tool and, it is just annoying in the fact that people don’t know how to use it to its fullest potential (I will have to admit, I am one among those who do automated promotion with paper.li). But, that is not what I want to talk about (because I have conflict b/w my actions and views and b/c I am interested in something else).

    What I am interested is Paper.li’s marketing technique. You see, paper.li never did big time marketing, but they were still able to conquer many twitter profiles. Why ? Because, they had big time marketing (that was done by their users). Everytime we tweet a tweet about paper.li (newspaper update), that is marketing thar paper.li gets. Each tweet has a paper.li link (Most of them has two – the via paper.li message – when users use the automated promoting technique. Think about the numbers – One tweet by thousands of twitterers, per day ! That is a lot of marketing. I thank you for reminding me of this (Now, I need to write an article about it).

    Thank you for the read,

    Jeevan Jacob John

    1. Ileane

      Hi there Jeevan! I love inspiring ideas 🙂 Thanks for letting me know that you learned how to improve your Paper.li skills plus you got a brain storm for a new blog post.

  23. Jake

    Hi Ileane,

    Like most of the guys, this is also the first time I came across of this Twitter tool. I watched the video and I was amazed how useful it can be. Thanks for sharing and I’m looking forward to learn more from you 🙂

  24. Ilka Flood

    Hi Ileane,

    I keep seeing this around Twitter but had no idea what it was. Thanks for shedding some light on this! I’ll be checking it out 🙂

    Have a great week!

    Ilka

    1. Ileane

      Hi Ilka – hope you can give this one a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon too 🙂 Thanks for stopping by and you have a great week too!!

  25. Adrienne

    There I go again, learning something new from you Miss Ileane!

    I’ve seen some of the daily newspapers being tweeted around and I think it was Brankica that tweeted it and mentioned me. I asked her what it was all about and she shared with me that my post was pulled because it was relevant to that topic. That was a first for me. I had no idea you could make your own though. Look out!!! I just may have to think about this.

    Thanks for the video explaining how to set this up. That was extremely helpful Ileane. As always you did an excellent job.

    Adrienne

    1. Ileane

      Hey Adrienne aka Blogging Sister Smith – I just gave you that name I hope you like it, if not let me know and we can change it.
      Thanks so much for your comment and retweet. Let me know how you make out. I think that incorporating Facebook keywords might come in handy for your niche sites.

  26. Paul

    Very useful twitter application especially if you want to republish old posts and compile them. Shared it to my network. Thanks Ileane 🙂

  27. Sathish

    Hi Ileane,

    Although I love to see the tweet that paper.li daily updates in my twitter profile, I seriously don’t know how it works. I will first go through their website and then I will comment on their feature.

    Sathish

    1. Ileane

      Hi Sathish, let me know if you have any problem setting up your Paper.li Do you have any Twitter lists yet?

  28. Emm

    paper.li is a powerful tool, isn’t it! This is a great tutorial video and excellent advice for beginners. I created a paper from one of my lists. I don’t want those people to clog up my Twitter stream (they are mainly charities and advocacy organisations). But I do like to read all of those posts once a week on a Saturday morning and thus, paper.li is perfect.

    I love your woo-hoo about the deleting. I agree!

    1. Ileane

      Hi Emm, nice to see you here at Basic Blog Tips! I appreciate you for actually watching the video too. If you get a chance can you give it a thumbs-up on YouTube?
      Thanks!

  29. Joshua

    I must say that I use Paperli, and it does make twitter things go really easy. I mean with having a blog to take care of along with plenty of other works to do,its best that we use automated plugins as this.

    1. Ileane

      Hi Joshua, Paper.li can be a time saver in more ways than one. Just don’t let it get to the point where the only Tweet you send out everyday is your Paper.li – that’s not a good sign 🙂

  30. Dave Lucas

    I have had a paperli daily account for awhile – I just let it run – Haven’t given any thought to reconstructing it – Now I may have to “recover” my password and set forth tinkering and tweaking

    1. Ileane

      Update your Paper.li and move things around. Once you get it to look the way you want – tweet it out to everyone. 🙂

  31. TechLinking

    Great tools. I am so happy to see this improvement, I tried Paper.li once but found that the content they chose didn’t mesh well with my message and I wouldn’t publish to my feed

  32. Naser

    Good for regular tweeters, will there a be same facebook widget ?
    I guess it may be on this vast web.

  33. DiTesco

    This is great new Ileane. I have been using Paper.li for a while now and although I thought it was a great Twitter tool to share some good stories about my community, there was the part that it would post anything, including unrelated stuff I wanted. Being able to edit them is a great addition and I am heading over there now to check out this new features. Thanks for sharing. you are always on top of these things 🙂

    1. Ileane

      DiTesco, I always try to make time to learn new Twitter tricks. It’s a shame I can’t transfer that enthusiasm over to something else like learning CSS or HTML5 or something super geeky like that 🙂

  34. Donna Anderson

    Thanks for the great video! People include me in their Paper.li papers all the time but I haven’t taken the plunge yet myself. I’m going to give it a shot but I’d love to see you do a post on how you choose the content.

    1. Ileane

      Hi Donna, Paper.li hasn’t gone that far yet. I don’t really get to choose the content per se – their algorithm picks the content. But it is based on Twitter lists that I curate or a topics that I choose to cover. The Paper.li algorithm has its faults (reminds me of Google) but they’re relatively minor – that’s why it’s so cool that we can just remove those little glitches when they pop up!
      If your goal is to be included in more paper.li use hashtags more often. Most Paper.li’s have filler content based on hashtags related to the surrounding content. Here’s what the “filler” contest looks like for #Blogging from the sidebar of my paper
      paperli hashtag #blogging

      Let me know if that answers your question. Thanks for stopping by.

      1. Donna Anderson

        Hi Ileane,

        That’s what I wanted to know. Right after I read this yesterday I went and set up a paper to see how it worked and I tinkered around with it for a while. Again, thanks for that great video. I’d been putting this off for a few months now but your video gave me just the push I needed. Have a great day, Ileane!

  35. Ileane

    Brankica, you can change the publish time of your Paper.li whenever you want. Here’s what I do, I created a few Paper.lis but I don’t tweet them out everyday. In a couple of days – your paper will need to be updated manually. So you can do that whenever you roll out of bed 🙂
    I don’t think they need to be tweeted everyday, that’s why I don’t keep them on auto-pilot – that gives me even more control. Got it?
    Here’s an example of a paper I Tweeted on Sunday – already it needs to be updated and this message appears above the title Update Paperli

    1. Brankica

      I turned the promote off and now all I need to do is wait for it to tell me to update it 🙂

      Thanks!

  37. Sonny

    I’d always considered Twitter a sort of press release tool, where you can issue “company” statements (even if that company is just you). The newspaper feel of this particular service just reinforces the press release aspect of Twitter, in my mind…

  38. Mitchell Allen

    Hi Ileane,

    I stopped used every twitter tool except HootSuite. That’s just me, though, and I’m glad you’ve found a thriving channel for publishing.

    I like your new logo, though I was used to the old one 🙂

    Cheers,

    Mitch

    1. Ileane

      Hi Mitch, thanks for what you said about the logo! I wanted a more three dimensional look and it was time for a change.

      HootSuite is the bomb isn’t it?

      Thanks!

      1. Mitchell Allen

        It certainly is. It blew up my computer twice, today.

        Just kidding. I do enjoy discovering new features. I made a click summary report. Woot!

        Cheers,

        Mitch

  39. Justin germino

    I think paper.li is pretty cool and have been using it for a while. I do like the morning and night editions for when you have large groups being polled.

    1. Ileane

      Hey Justin, your Paper.li is extremely popular. When I take a look at Article Tracker your Paper.li has the most views of anyone I’ve seen so far. I think it was close to 5,000 views. You’re amazing! Thanks so much for stopping by.

  40. Camden

    Ileane,
    I just found Paper.li last night. I love the idea and the way it looks (I stayed up way too late last night playing with it)! I didn’t know that you personalized it it so many ways, so your tutorial is really helpful.

    But here’s my question – what exactly do you DO with your Paper.li? Do you just send out tweets about it to selected people? I didn’t see anyplace on your site where it was embedded or advertised (although I may have missed it).

    Thanks for you help with this…I’m pretty new to Twitter and am still trying to figure all this out!

  41. Adam

    Hi Ileane,

    I discovered your post from Brankica. I have to agree for the most part with ExtremeJohn above, and I just blogged about Paper.Li to that effect.

    I think the ability to turn off the autotweet can help, but then I guess I still question the value to the reader? Then also, to the blogger. I would be curious to know how much traffic you have gotten from Paper.Li and if it has been worth it?

    That being said, I am glad discussing Paper.li helped me discover your blog. 🙂 Looking forward to digging into some more posts!

  42. Ileane

    Hi Adam,

    I’ll make a Paper.li convert out of you before it’s all over! LOL!

    All jokes aside – and I do take my Paper.li’s very seriously – my use of Paper.li appears to be quite different from those you have encountered in the past. So let me break it down as best as I can considering I’m at work. Otherwise this could turn into another blog post by itself.

    Let’s start with Twitter lists. How are you tracking Twitter lists? How many lists do you have? How many are you on? (Don’t answer any of those questions, but I’ll give you my answers).
    I track lists in HootSuite, Twitter or you guessed – with Paper.li
    I have 18 lists so far (I think there’s a limit of 20 but I don’t need more than 18 so I never tried)
    Currently I’m on 295 lists! Yup that’s right – with “only” 2,500 followers I’m on a lot of lists compared to people with twice as many followers.

    Now, keep in mind that you DO NOT need to follow people in order to have them on a list. So if you look at many of my lists you’ll see that I’m not following half the people on them 🙂

    Like I said, I keep track of my lists in HootSuite but with 18 lists you can imagine that would be a whole lot of columns and a whole lot of Tweets right?! In comes Paper.li to the rescue!

    Let me give you an real life example.

    I recently became involved in the Small Business Influencer Awards for 2011 as an official Media Partner. I created a Twitter list and a Paper.li to keep track of the awards, nominations, judges, sponsors and anything related to #smbinfluencer. I love advocating Small Business. But my specialty is Blogging and Social Media. In fact I don’t even have a Small Business!

    Now, every morning I get an email that tells me the Paper.li is ready. I don’t have to scroll down the column on my HootSuite – I just open the paper and put on my CURATOR hat and weed out all the junk, move the stories with the eye-catching images (and the most value for small business) to the top, make sure the sponsors and judges are represented and send out the tweet.

    One more step – I hand pick the people who will be mentioned in the tweet. Does each story come from their blog – no, will each story send traffic to their blog – no.

    But when all is said and done and the awards have been given out (at the end of the summer) will anyone associated with the contest remember Ileane or Basic Blog Tips???? I’ll let you answer that one. 🙂

    Currently, this blog is being ranked on Technorati in the top 100 for small business “authority” http://technorati.com/blogs/basicblogtips.com and I get traffic from Technorati almost every day.

    I have Twitter lists for my guest bloggers, my social networks (like Blog Engage and Blokube) and other topics of interest like Facebook – but I’d never see those tweets if it wasn’t for Paper.li.

    What I just described is a lot of work and it takes time and a little detective work to pull off. For those lazy Paper.li users who plug in a hashtag put Paper.li on autotweet and call it a day, please send them my way.

    Btw – you should check out the Small Business Influencer Awards – you can self-nominate if you’d like – no one will ever know.

  44. Techmaker

    By just reading your comments I learnt a lot on paper.li. I made a paper too. Thanks for sharing those important tips with us.

    Keep good work up.

  45. Madison Ruppert

    I’ve seen a pretty solid amount of traffic from people putting me in their paper.li digests. I’ve noticed new followers too. I’ve yet to play around with it myself though.

  46. Mario M.

    Wow this is good stuff. Twitter is one of the social networks I regularly post on. Thank you for letting me find a way to control daily news. I will definitely imply it in real life.

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