Optimizing your sources
Whether you are using the free or the Pro Paper.li service, if you are interested in making the most of your content, take a look at these tips to bring in content using the full force and power of Paper.li.
Think source quality over source quantity
Papers with more sources don't necessarily have better content. Here are some tips on optimizing the sources you're using:
1. Genius Source With the new Genius Source, we've given you the power to leverage the millions of articles we collect each day and unearth the most relevant and trending content out there. These sources are keyword-based and work like the main topic source you chose when initially setting up your paper.li.
2. Your twitter list Add your own private or public twitter list. With a little research, you can curate a list of the thought leaders in your topic area.
A twitter list counts as one source, but it's a curated list of many twitter users. If you have individual twitter users in your content source list, then gather them all up into one twitter list and add that list as a source.
Adding a twitter list is an instant boost in high-quality content and only counts as one source!
3. Public Twitter list Did you know you can add public twitter lists?
One of the easiest ways of finding high quality lists is to look at the Twitter accounts of the thought leaders in your topic area. Besides being good sources of information themselves, these people may have curated public lists that you may follow and add to your paper.
4. Regularly prune your list of sources. Open up your list of sources and review them regularly. If you have sources that are sharing little or no content, weed them out to make room for other sources!
In addition, people's interests change over time. You may also need to remove news sharers from your sources who are no longer sharing content relative to your interests. For example, in 2017, we've seen a huge up-tick of political articles shared. If your paper is not political, check your sources to identify any twitter lists and twitter members and check their timelines to be sure that the content shared is still inline with the news you're looking for.
What is a source exactly?
When a source is added to your content list in your Paper Settings Dashboard, Paper.li will automatically pull in any articles, images or videos shared from that source.
In many cases, a "source" is a social media account such as a user from Twitter, a Facebook group or page, or a Youtube channel. A "source" might also be a group of users together, such as a twitter list. In these examples, each time the users of the service share content on the social media channel, Paper.li pulls the content automatically into your paper in a readable format!
Other kinds of sources include an RSS feed which pulls in any new content posted on a particular website you follow or our own Genius Source which pulls in content based on keywords from the millions of articles we pull in daily.
Comments
6 comments
Only 10 sources... it won't make the paper interesting. People doesn't border just to view 10 or less features...
Hi! Thanks for your comment.... Just to clarify, we are not limiting the number of articles to ten, only the number of sources. I took a look at your sources and see that you have several twitter users as sources. Those twitter users can all be collapsed down to one source if you create a twitter list (whcih is composed of twitter users) and add that one twitter list to your paper as a source.
How do I put all the twitter users in a list?
Hi Rick! Sorry that your question slipped through the cracks. Here are instructions on how to create a twitter list: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460
Your "Genius Source" is in most cases not relevant serious content. It is mainstream headlines. I would be ashamed to pick this up in my Online Magazine. I don't use Twitter. So I am restricted to 25 Sources only as a Pro. That's far too less.
Hi Kerstin, The quality of results returned for the Genius source depends a lot on what matches we find in our database of articles. Sometimes the cause of content that is not specific enough is due to the keyword search being too general. One way to improve the quality of results is by using the URL of an example article to "teach" the Genius source more specifically what you're looking for. To try this out, you can create a free test paper and enter the URL of an example article of the kind of articles you wish to see into the search field when creating the paper. If you like what you see, you can then add that same article URL in the search field of your Content tab. (Instructions to add a genius source based on article URL are found here under "tips for great content results" https://support.paper.li/hc/en-us/articles/215805718-Add-content-with-the-Genius-Source
If that doesn't help, let me know.
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