Do you want your blog to get found? Are you looking to drive new, loyal readers to it? Do you want to expand your thought leadership? Are you tired of your tweeted links evaporating? Do you want to create conversation around your content?

Whether you’re blogging for yourself or your business, Pinyadda’s platform allows you to connect your content with the people interested in it and create community around it. Here are the top 5 reasons you and your blog should be on Pinyadda:

Reach new readers

When you publish a post on your blog, Pinyadda places it into topic-based feeds. People choose to follow these topic feeds so if, for example, your post covers mobile and social media, anyone following those topics will see the post in their feeds. Many people discover new sites from posts they read in their topic feeds and in turn follow that site. While the average online news reader visits 2-4 sites regularly, the average Pinyadda member follows 12-16 sites!

Users also discover new sites by visiting the Newsstand on Pinyadda, an interactive way to connect people with the content, sites, and people who match their interests. For example, users can find recommended sites related to a particular topic. The Newsstand is also the first place new users are dropped when they register for Pinyadda, so it is one of the most frequented visited pages by the community.

Curate your posts

You actively curate your content within the Pinyadda community by sharing it (we call this pinning), perhaps asking a specific question about the content or summarizing what it is about. When you pin an article, everyone following you on Pinyadda will see that you shared it (similar to a tweet on Twitter) and they can then pin and discuss the article too, passing it along to their friends and followers. These pins also hit a community feed that people visit to discover what’s currently being pinned and discussed on Pinyadda.

Reward your top readers

People who pin and discuss your blog posts regularly can become the Ambassador of your site. This is part of what we call value mechanics on Pinyadda, automatically rewarding your top users, and allowing them to boast the status on their profiles. Knowing your Ambassadors also allows you to get to what other content they follow and the people who follow them.

Establish influence

Another part of Pinyadda’s value mechanics are topic Mavens. You become the Maven of a topic that your blog covers by pinning and discussing news and blog posts related to it. Mavens and Ambassadors are featured heavily in the Pinyadda community – from feed pages and the Pinyadda Newsstand to our weekly newsletter and blog posts where we promote all the top people and influencers on Pinyadda. Being featured in this way means more people will follow you on Pinyadda and find your blog’s content.

Create community

As you begin to pin and discuss your posts as well as other articles, you will begin to create community around your content. Regardless of whether you are discussing your own blog posts, other content on the same topic your blog covers or general news, this activity on Pinyadda is inbound marketing for your blog. Once people feel that they have a connection with you and see you as a real person, they’ll be much more likely to help evangelize your content and come back for more. As any social media pro will tell you, it’s all about conversation!

__________

How do you use Pinyadda with your blog? Let us know in the comments!

Here’s why Pinyadda is the best way to share news on Twitter, including examples from our community:

Know the best articles and blog posts to share

Pinyadda is like your personal assistant for news and information. Instead of having to go site-to-site or do searches (and often dig) for the news and blog posts that you want to click on, Pinyadda sifts through the firehose of content for you and collects the articles and posts you’re most likely interested in. Pinyadda serves the good stuff to you in real-time, filing each article as it’s published into clean pages you can browse based on topics, sites and people you follow (click for a quick 30-sec video overview).

With Pinyadda, you know the articles you’ll be into sharing to Twitter without lifting a finger:

• Want to tweet about news on a particular topic? Go to that topic page and see articles being published about it from sites across the web on everything from your city or favorite sports team to things like celebrities, food, social media, autos or green tech.
• Want to tweet articles from your go-to sites? View a feed of what’s been published most recently from all your favorites, and if you have one site in mind go to it’s individual feed page. (Tip: Here you can even tell Pinyadda to show you only articles published from a few sections of that site. It’s great for big sites like Boston.com where you may only be interested in a couple sections, like sports and events.)
• Want to share an article that lots of people are talking about? Go to your Home feed to see what articles people you follow are sharing (we call it pinning). You can also toggle to the “All People” feed to see what’s buzzing in the whole community on Pinyadda — lots of people use Pinyadda like a digital water cooler to share and discuss articles with groups of friends and colleagues, so you can always find great stuff.

Craft engaging news-related tweets

Since people use Twitter for different reasons, we designed Pinyadda’s integration with it with flexibility top of mind. This way you stay in the drivers seat of your voice and can mold your tweets as you like. Here are examples of some of the most effective ways to share all the news goodness on Pinyadda to Twitter:

1. Share a headline. This is the most basic way to share news to your Twitter followers. Just copy and paste the headline from the feed into the comment box. It’s straightforward, easy, and gets the news out quickly to your followers. (Tip: If you you want to legitimize the source of the link, include its Twitter handle, e.g. I know Boston.com is @bostonupdate.)
   
2. Share a quote, main point, question, or data point from the article. These are great ways to shake up how you share news articles to Twitter. These often grab your followers attention better than a straight headline, and shows you’re putting some TLC into your tweets.
   
3. Add value to the article by including your own commentary. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, opinions, or simply add some humor to the news you share with your followers.
   
4. Direct an article to a Twitter follower. Often when we read an article we think of someone – be it an inside joke, something that will help them in their job, or is relevant to other aspects of their lives. If the person you’re thinking of isn’t as ahead of the curve as you and on Pinyadda too, include their Twitter handle at the beginning. (Better yet, invite them to Pinyadda!)
   
5. Share a discussion to Twitter. If you’re part of or come across a great discussion on an article on Pinyadda that your followers on Twitter would like, simply enter  something like “check out this great discussion about X” when sharing the link to Twitter. (Tip: Combining #4 and #5 is killer if you know someone’s really into a subject,e.g. tweeting “thought you’d want in on this convo.”)
6. Promote a site you think is great. If you come across a site on Pinyadda you want your Twitter followers to know about, simply visit that site’s page and click on the big blue “share this site” button. You can even customize the message you want to tweet out with it.
   
7. Share your profile on Pinyadda to Twitter. Want people to know what topics and sites you follow, how many followers you’ve gained, and what you’ve pinned on Pinyadda? (We like to call this your news graph.) Simply tweet out the URL to your Pinyadda profile or include it in your Twitter bio.
8. Share your Yadda shwag to boost your cred on Twitter. Pinyadda’s points system allows you to compete to earn coveted spots as the “Maven” of topics or “Ambassadors” of your favorite sites. You can also unlock fun badges (some even have coupon codes attached) just for pinning the news you’re into. For example, we teamed up with the marketing gurus over at Hubspot and you can earn their Inbound Marketing Ninja badge set by pinning inbound marketing news. You can share all this cred by clicking on what you’ve earned from your profile. Want to be the Maven of Twitter?  Sounds like it’s time to get your yadda on!
   

Connecting Pinyadda to your Twitter account is easy.

Connecting Pinyadda with your Twitter account is simple. Choose an article you want to tweet, enter text you’d like to tweet in the comment box, select the Twitter checkbox, and hit the “Pin it” button (click here for a 30-second video). If it’s your first time doing this you’ll be prompted with a pop-up to enter your Twitter username and password. Once that’s done, the text in the comment box and a unique short URL will hit your Twitter feed.

When one of your Twitter followers clicks on the link, they’ll be brought to a page with the article. If the text you entered in the comment box exceed Twitter’s 140 character limit, Pinyadda automatically truncates. Rest assured, because when your Twitter followers click the URL they’ll see your full comment.

To manage your Twitter account on Pinyadda, visit the Contacts tab of your settings. There you can even see who out of the people you follow on Twitter are also on Pinyadda.

__________

Do you have other examples of great ways to share news to Twitter?  How can we make sharing links to Twitter better for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors.  This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example.   Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.

In the past several years, the Internet has turned the news and greater media industry on its head – everything from content creation to distribution has completely changed.  This has created problems for both consumers and publishers.  For consumers, discovering and accessing the news that is most valuable to us has become overwhelming.  For publishers, developing a strong community and converting that community into hard dollars has become incredibly difficult.   At Pinyadda, we have designed our platform specifically focusing on the evolved news and media landscape, hosting what we call the “news graph“.

The individual parts of the news graph have existed for a long time (post about this coming soon).  With Pinyadda, we are focused on connecting these critical parts and providing more value to the different entities within the news ecosystem.  We have studied how our behavior as news consumers has changed and have provided simple tools for enabling each individual user to get the information they need from the sites they like, the topics they follow and from interesting people.  For publishers, we have focused on providing an open distribution platform aimed at extending publisher’s reach and exposure through automated distribution and organization.  This framework will provide the foundation to enable publishers to capture more critical data and eventually monetize the distribution of their content.

While we have experienced tremendous growth in the short time our platform has been open, we are still young and focused on making improvement to best serve our community of users and publishers.  Our intention for this post is to start of on-going discourse regarding the evolution of the news graph, which we invite you all to contribute to.  We believe the news graph is a critical component to ensuring that consumers have an effective way to access the best information available for their unique interests and needs, as well as enabling publishers to capitalize on providing quality content.

Coming soon: The Working Parts of the News Graph

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, once stated that, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about the death of privacy, one has to wonder whether Barlow’s statement may be more relevant to the times if phrased: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking Facebook to respect the private information of its users.”

While there are plenty of smart people arguing the pros and cons of the effects of Facebook’s new privacy changes and Google Buzz’s auto-following model on users’ private information online, I am more interested in the business implications of these developments.  The industry powers like Facebook and Google seem to be in a mad dash to make more information public; however, I wonder if this push for extended network connectivity is smart for all networks.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen found that Twitter’s “heavy users” in the UK consist of 7% of the user population and make up 79% of the total amount of time spent on the site.  Facebook on the other hand sees in the UK 52% of its population as “heavy users” making up 98% of the time spent on site.  While this distinction between the distributions of user activity on the two sites could be attributed to a number of things (e.g. type of content hosted, product differences, etc.), I personally believe that the network designs with regards to privacy and the nature of users information have the largest effect on the user activity distributions.

When analyzing the value of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, much of the excitement comes from data that shows digital word-of-mouth as the most trusted marketing form.  Taking this into consideration, you would think that Facebook and Twitter would want to be very deliberate in making adjustments to privacy settings and product design that effects how information is shared throughout their networks, with a focus on optimizing the distribution of user activity in a way that would best support their business models.

The two networks are typically used for very different things – I think of Facebook as my “social life identity” and Twitter as my “broadcast identity“.  Inevitably, Twitter is a much more public platform than Facebook which would suggest the distribution of user activity will always be a bit more skewed. However, I think it is safe to assume those over at Twitter are probably thinking of ways to engage a larger portion of their user base.  From Facebook’s standpoint, I find the sneaky move to make user’s information more public by default is certainly questionable in terms of user trust, but also strange from a business standpoint.  Facebook’s biggest strength is how deeply people engage with on another on the site, by making such a change I feel they could be jeopardizing this.

I am interested to hear what others thing about this – do you think it is smart for Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz all to be pushing consumers to share more information publicly?  Do you think it is smart for one and not the others?  Let me know in the comments.

I am also interested in hearing from any of you statistical nerds about what you think ideal user activity distributions would look like for the different networks.  I’ll write a follow up post with my opinions on this if there is any activity around the idea.

I think the API model is a great example for the newspaper industry. It allows them to stop worrying so much about their distribution problem and get back to doing what they do best – producing content. Let the rest of the developer community worry about finding ways to get the news to readers. But I’m not so sure the Times thinks about their API this way, and the announcement that they’ll be erecting a pay wall in the coming year seems to reinforce that doubt.

It seems like the Times sees this API as a way to establish itself as the definitive archive of all events past – the lens through which history is viewed and dissected. As such, it will be incredibly valuable, allowing historians and documentarians to uncover meta-trends and write fascinating feature pieces about them (who they’ll get to publish those pieces, well…). But when I think API, thanks to Twitter, I think “now.” I think about developers building great experiences around the wealth of content that belongs to the Times, about innovative new ways to organize and discover its content, about new solutions to the old media problem. The Times’ management, I fear, does not share my sentiments.

If the pay wall goes up – and I’m not entirely convinced it actually will – the API either becomes far less useful or far more useful, depending on the restrictions applied. I find it hard to believe that it will exist in its current form, with open access to all articles one hour after publication. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The point of all this rambling, you ask? The point is that the Times seems like a two-headed monster to me. Half the time, they do everything right – the first to truly incorporate lots of multimedia, the first to successfully incorporate the blog form, the first to understand the web as an opportunity and not a threat. The the other half of the time, they seem trapped in the same delusional nostalgia that’s handicapping the rest of the industry – the display ad run-around, the formatting stalemate, and now the paywall. I suspect that there’s considerable internal tension between these two forces as well. And I’m not sure who will win.

Maybe the pay wall will work for the Times. But its life span, as far as I see, is inherently limited. No matter what we believe in, no matter how long it takes, the price of content will eventually reach zero. There’s just no way the generation that’s coming up behind us will swallow a monthly fee for access to a publication that holds no emotional or collective social value for them.

I give the Times credit for trying something – anything – to stop the revenue drain that’s been their standard operating procedure for the last few years. But they should keep looking for a long-term solution – one that’s closer to the API than the pay wall.