I recently created a daily paper for the National Community Boating Association. The Community Boating Times supports both waterways and community regeneration. We share waterways updates, charity news and current affairs. You will find videos, photos, education, politics, tips and advice.
If you’re on Twitter you may have seen other users tweeting their daily papers. You can quickly and easily create your own, to promote yourself, your work, your blog, organisation or business. Paper.li collects tweets and other sources (that you specify) and turns them into a professional looking daily paper. You can choose to ‘feed’ the paper with your own tweets, tweets from your timeline, #hashtags, RSS feeds from relevant websites, YouTube channels and more. Paper.li only looks for tweets with links, so that each link is displayed as a snippet of a story. The content is displayed under different headings such as Arts & Entertainment, Health, Education, Business, and relevant #hashtags. It also displays your own live Twitter feed. The basic service is free but you can also choose a pro version with additional features such as a personalised header and no adverts.
To get started, you will need to sign into Paper.li with your Twitter account. If you’re creating the paper for an organisation or business make sure you sign in with that account and not your personal Twitter id. You choose what time the paper gets published each day and it will tweet a link to the paper @ mentioning a few of today’s contributers. You set this up under the ‘promote your paper’ options. I publish mine around 1pm when Twitter is busiest.
The plus sides, for me, are that you provide plenty of interesting content for your followers, and whenever your paper features somebody on Twitter they are likely to 1) Look at your paper, 2) Re-tweet your paper. It’s nice to be noticed! However, Paper.li does choose content at random so be aware that not ever y story may be perfect for your audience.
If you work in the voluntary sector, are interested in canal boating or just want to help us raise awareness of our work why not subscribe to The Community Boating Times? You may also like my own paper, The Narrowboat Wife Weekly.
Peggy Melmoth 