(Disclosure: Over the last year I worked with Paper.li on its marketing and user-engagement strategies, but not on the development of its Juice app. I agreed to review the app here in exchange for letting me have a sneak-peek at it before it went public.)
Earlier this week, Paper.li launched its first iPhone app, Juice. The idea behind Juice is simple: Every day it analyzes your Twitter followers, and finds the 10 most popular links they are sharing, and gives them to you so you can share them as well. Now at first this seems counter-intuitive, why would you want to share back the same content that’s already been shared? But believe me, most of your Twitter followers have not seen the stories, and for most of them it’s great content that they enjoy seeing.
So when you download the app (You can get it here from the site and here from the iTunes app store), you sign in and it starts analyzing your Twitter followers to see what they are sharing. Then, it gives you the 10 recommended stories for that day.
Here’s a couple of screenshots of what the suggested stories look like:
Then you can read the source, and/or share it. One thing I love is notice underneath the story it gives you some data either on the story, or the source. Like for the Moz article on the left, underneath it adds that the story is ‘Shared 104.0x above average rate’. This can help you decide which stories to share.
Then when you select to share a story, you get this view:
Guys look closely, when you share a story from Juice, the app automatically pulls a picture from the story and includes it in the tweet. Adding a picture to your tweet is HUGE for bumping engagement. I am constantly looking for stories to share from my feed reader or on other social sites, and when I click the RT button on a site, 99% of the time it does not add the post’s picture to the tweet. Just the title of the story, and the link. Which is crazy (click the blue Twitter button at the top of this post and you’ll see that the picture is automatically added to the tweet you’ll send out). Adding the photo means a higher engagement rate.
Now there is one thing I don’t like about Juice, it currently doesn’t have an option for scheduling when the tweets can go out. For example, let’s say Juice gives me 10 suggested stories to share today, and I decide that I want to share 7 of them. The tweets will go out as soon as I send them. I would like a way to schedule the tweets so that they go out say one every hour. That way I can share the 7 stories over the span of the next 7 hours, instead of blasting out 7 links in 7 minutes. By doing that, it limits the visibility that these tweets will get.
Other than that, I think Juice is a pretty lightweight and easy way to find and share content that your followers will enjoy. It’s currently only available for iPhone users, but I believe they will be rolling out a version for Android users soon. You can download the Juice app here from the site and here from the iTunes app store. If you do use Juice, let me what you think!
