Month: October 2012

How to move your content from Posterous to WordPress

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There was a time when Posterous and Tumblr were the two cool kids on the evolving mini-blogging scene. But while Tumblr despite many down-times grew exponentially, Posterous somehow didn’t manage to follow the same path. Then in March this year, Twitter announced the acquisition of Posterous. According to media reports, Twitter was mainly interested in the Posterous team, leaving users wondering whether the blogging service does have a future.

It’s not unlikely to assume that Posterous won’t exist forever, also judging from bugs and issues that have been plaguing Posterous users during the recent month and that are not properly being fixed. Recently, Posterous founder Sachin Agarwal said that the team is working on a new exporting tool which would be the best solution to export content out of Posterous. Since Posterous feels rather abandoned nowadays, there seems to be only one reasonable explanation for why the team develops a new exporting tool: in order to be able to close down the platform.

For those of you who are still using Posterous and who don’t want to wait until the last second, there is already now a great way of moving away from Posterous: Exporting your content to a WordPress blog, the world’s leading blogging platform.

It’s a very simple process. Here is how you do it:

For hosted blogs on WordPress.com

If you don’t want to host your own WordPress blog, the free or paid service on WordPress.com is a good alternative. After you have created your blog, log into the admin panel and click on “tools” in the left navigation bar. In the popup layer, click on “import”. Choose “Posterous” from the list of available services, enter the URL of your Posterous blog, the email address you used for registering with Posterous and your Posterous password, and press “Submit”. That’s all, now just wait until your content has fully been pulled out of Posterous.

For self-hosted WordPress blogs

If you decide to host your own WordPress blog with the free software from WordPress.org, you need ot install the Posterous importer plugin before you can move your content form Posterous to your WordPress blog. In the WordPress admin panel, click on “Plugins” in the left navigation bar, “Add new”, and search for “Posterous”. Choose the “Posterous Importer” from the list of search results and press “Install now”. After that is done, click on “tools” in the left navigation bar. In the popup layer, click on “import”. Choose “Posterous” from the list of available services, enter the URL of your Posterous blog, the email address you used for registering with Posterous and your Posterous password, and press “Submit”. That’s all, now just wait until your content has fully been pulled out of Posterous.

What Twingly can do for your business

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When Twingly first launched in 2006, we provided users with a great way to search through the global blogosphere. Over the years we’ve added a variety of products and services targeted at businesses, to make use of the vast blog data that we are indexing permanently, and to enable companies to get insights into the blogosphere, to understand what bloggers are writing about, and to identify trends as they evolve.

Recently we’ve launched a new homepage to give you a better overview about our different services and products. But since we haven’t published a complete list of what Twingly can do for your business in a blog post and lots of things have changed since the early days, here’s a compact overview about our services, categorized by your industry:

How Twingly helps news & media sites

For news and media sites, opening up to the blogosphere has at least two major advantages. By linking to blog posts, media outlets can offer their readers additional information, opinions and point of views from bloggers around the country or even the world. Second, by encouraging bloggers to link to news sites, online newspapers receive additional traffic and benefit from improved search engine rankings.

Twingly has 2 solutions to help news & media sites to accomplish this:

Blogstream: Media sites can embed our Blogstream widget on their pages, showing incoming links from the blogosphere. It’s added value for the readers, and it gives bloggers a clear reason to engage with the content and link to it, because they want to be shown inside the widget, which sends traffic back to them. Read more about Blogstream, and find some examples here.

Blogwatch: The Blogwatch widget is similar to Blogstream, but with the difference that it doesn’t show content with incoming links, but content based on specific, pre-defined keywords. It’s a great way for news & media sites to add additional, relevant content from external sites by linking to it. Read more about Blogwatch and find some examples here.

In case you want to learn more about Blogstream and Blogwatch and how it can help you, we’d love to hear from you.

How Twingly helps e-commerce sites

What’s one of the major ways e-commerce sites can attract new customers without the need of high marketing investments? By giving bloggers who write about products a good reason to link to specific product pages on shopping sites. Twingly has the tools for that!

eTrade: This is our version of Blogstream especially made for e-commerce sites. By embedding the eTrade widget on product pages, every time a blogger links to this specific product page, the link is shown within the widget. Because of that, bloggers really have a reason to link as much as possible to a specific e-commerce site, sending lots of potential new customers. More on eTrade.

Blogwatch: Of course, our Blogwatch widget isn’t only suited for news & media sites. If you run an e-commerce site and want to give your existing and future customers additional context on the products and services sold, why not link to relevant blog posts from across the web? Th Blogwatch widget enables you to do exactly that. Read more about Blogwatch

In case you want to learn more about eTrade and Blogwatch and how it can help you, we’d love to hear from you.

How Twingly helps media monitoring companies

For media monitoring companies, data is what powers them. Lots of data. Fortunately, Twingly can provide you with exactly that: data from the international blogosphere. With Twingly, your monitoring service can get access to over 54 million blogs in 30 languages, easily and conveniently through our API, as a monthly subscription without any hidden fees, all tech support included.

We offer three different data API’s:

Livefeed: Customers get all complete blog data in real time.
Analytics: Commercial search of our blog search engine on Twingly.com/search
RSS-feed: RSS-feed for commercial use

In case you want to try one of those API services, we offer a 2-week free trial period. For more information, have a look at this extensive FAQ for our API services. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for all questions and inquiries.

Twingly Team Interviews: “Twingly’s client list says a lot about the quality of its products”

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It has been a while since we published our last Twingly Team interview. Time to pick that little tradition of ours up again. This time we asked a couple of questions to Lorina Eldib, who recently joined Twingly as account manager. She explains what drives her motivation, which kind of blogs she reads and how she plans to incentivize her colleagues to give their best at work.

Hi! Please introduce yourself to the readers.
My name is Lorina, I am 27 years old, living in the Swedish town of Norrköping, about 160 km south of Stockholm, and I recently joined Twingly as account manager. After school I learned to become a florist, but rather quickly ended up working with sales instead of flowers. First within the event sector where I became project manager and was in charge of 12 sales people, then at a company offering survey and analytics services. I was the accout manager for about 100 clients, from small-sized companies to big corporations such as Volvo.

Lorina and her daughter

…and then you heard that Twingly had a vacancy?
Exactly. My old boss pointed me to the open position at Twingly, which sounded like it would suit me perfectly. He knows Twingly’s recently appointed CEO Peter Bláha so after I told him that I was interested, he let Peter know. Peter called me and asked me to send my CV. And here I am.

What was it that made you curious about Twingly?
Exciting clients from many different sectors. As an account manager it’s always fun to deal with renowned companies and brands, and it says a lot about the quality of the products Twingly offers.

If you could chose, do you prefer to work with a hundred different clients at once or rather with a smaller number?
I think for an account manger it’s desirable to work with a limited number of clients which you really can focus your attention on.

How familiar are you with the blogosphere?
I’m not a blogger myself but since I love to bake together with my daughter I read a couple of baking blogs to find inspiration and to understand whether the ingredients and tools I plan to buy are of high quality. I usually purchase these online which means that I can’t touch them. Bloggers help me to ensure to have a great baking experience and to create delicious pastries.

Which are your favourite baking blogs?
Passion 4 baking and sotasaker.com (unfortunately not available in English).

I’ve seen you carrying an iPhone around. What are your favourite apps that you really don’t want to be without anymore?
Runkeeper, Facebook, LinkedIn, SEB, Spotify, Twitter, Säljstöd (Salesforce).

How do you use that sales app?
Considering that I don’t have the world’s best memory it helps me to get immediate access to all the client information when I need it – even when working remotely.

Does that happen often?
Yeah quite often. I work from the train, from the bus, sometimes from home…

What’s your personal career goal at Twingly?
Like any passionate and ambitious sales person I want to be at the top of the internal sales ranking. Furthermore I’m looking forward working internationally as well as coaching new sales personnel.

Can you colleagues expect to be surprised with baked goods when reaching their targets?
There is a chance ; )

But if the Twingly team from now on will be supplied with cookies and cake on a regular basis, maybe you should introduce a weekly gym day as well…
Well, we have Peter as our personal trainer. He’s still pretty much into Rugby and tries to get us excited about the sport, too.

Twingly currently has more sales vacancies. Do you think people need to have a strong web background to be able to become great account managers at Twingly?
I don’t think so. Most of the things you can learn “on the job”. But of course it can be an advantage to already know the industry.