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Yes, I am on 3DShare and I seem to get a many more views of my designs than I am getting on pinshape. Also since I am also promoting my designs on Twitter - I see very few #3dpinting posts from you. What is up with that? I understand that the sharing community is important to you but what are you doing to help bring the best designers to your site? I don’t think having the ability to bulk upload from Thingiverse is all that positive. Your site is just full of what I would call very primitive designs that distract from the great designs you have. I do like the very professional look and functionality of your website. It is far superior to 3DShare (which has ongoing issues).

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Hi Nerdvice,

Thanks for the questions! I’m glad to hear some comparisons to 3DShare from you, we haven’t had much feedback about them in general. There are obviously a number of reasons that could contribute to you getting more views on 3DShare thus far including the algorithms they use to sort and display work, the selection and quality of designs on their site that you are competing for attention with as well as the overall traffic of the site. A quick look into the overall traffic shows that they have a significant amount less traffic than we do, so it’s likely a matter of how they serve up designs to be viewed or how they count views.

I can certainly assure you we are doing everything we can on a day-to-day as well as on a higher-level basis to grow the community. We have tried many approaches to marketing, some of which have be successful, and some of which haven’t been as successful, but we’ve been growing 100% month over month for the past 5 months. As a small team of 8, we are working hard to build a product people love using, while spreading the word about it to passionate 3D printing enthusiasts like yourself. Speaking to Twitter specifically, we test out various messages and formats to see what gets the most attention and build off of those findings to improve our efforts.

As far as the Thingiverse importer is concerned, it’s something we have seen be an important part of getting new, talented designers interested in Pinshape to begin with. We do our best to limit suspect quality designs that are transferred over (nothing with the Thingiverse render as it’s product image and nothing without a .STL or .OBJ file) and as a result, it seems to be a way to add many more great models to our site than we would have been able to otherwise. In some cases, what you refer to as primitive designs are brought in from Thingiverse, yes, but people can also upload those designs manually. More often than not, we see great work being added to the community on a daily basis. Additionally, with our Prints system that allows reviews, it’s much easier to find high quality designs than on Thingiverse.

With all that said, we do certainly have a long way to go to grow into what we envision. If you have any suggestions about different efforts we could undertake to further grow the community, or help get the current community more involved, we would absolutely love to hear them! Thanks so much for the questions and feedback.

Nick, Co-Founder

As a side note, in looking at 3DShare I see a number of designs marked as ‘Exclusive’ to 3DShare, including some of your work which also appears on our site. You may want to look into what is happening with that.

What is happening with that is that when I try to edit my models on 3dShare in any way all the text is deleted after saving. So it is basically a pain in the ass to change anything after it is set up. Like I said, the site has issues. In addition, there is very little going on in your forum - It does not seem like you have much involvement? As someone who teaches and sets up social media for small businesses, you really need to get with the program and start tweeting. I can watch my product views go up as soon as I post on Twitter or Google Plus. It’s about engagement… Engage or … Just my opinion… Perhaps someone there should monitor #3dprinting on Sunday and see what is going on? I have made all kinds of connections and I have a bunch of people/companies supporting and communicating with me. I post my new designs of Google Plus to a community called 3dPrint/printing which as 15,905 members. You need a social media person…

This is being retweeted a lot right now - http://3dprint.com/69023/top-3d-share-voronoi-ape/ - You see why I am getting views on 3DShare? Almost 19000 views so far…

Lawrence

Hey Lawrence, thanks for taking the time to provide some thoughtful suggestions. Feedback is always appreciated and welcome. We are constantly tweaking what we do so we’ll certainly take your thoughts into account.

As for the forum, you’re right, we need to put in more effort here to make sure there is interesting topics and interaction for everyone in the community. Twitter, on the other hand, is something that is already part of our marketing effort and we are tweeting a few times a day, showing off blog posts and products from our community. We also post regularly on G+, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and more, along with our subscriber email lists. I’d encourage you to follow us on any and all of those channels that you use. We do have a Social Media Specialist (Karen) and a Community Manager (Ed) who are handling all of this, and we’re seeing great growth in traffic from all channels.

One thing to keep in mind is that in a growing community, we would love to feature designs from all of our designers on our social media channels, but it’s simply isn’t possible all the time. We try to follow the trends of what the makers on our community are interested in, and share high quality models that fall in line with our findings. To help the community out, we’ve analyzed what factors of a design listing have the biggest impact on transactions and shared them in our May 3D Printing Trend Report. For any designer looking to get more exposure on Pinshape, these guidelines are a great place to start.

Nick

Nick,

I am really still quite amazed at the lack of views I get. I can tweet about my new designs on 3DShare and watch my views go up immediately. I tweet the same design with a Pinshape link an I get almost no views! I guess your folks are not on Twitter? Well anyway, seems strange to me. I did think your “we are tweeting a few times a day” was kind of a telling statement. It reminds me of a recent event I was at where corporate (social media) people tried to explain their social media strategies. It was quite amusing to hear them think about Twitter in the same way they think about advertising. Examining the interaction metrics and running reports for their bosses. Well anyway, tell Karen that I will try giving you guys more free exposure by telling my tweeps and the #3dprinting tweeps to check your awesome website out. Also tell Karen that the last time I tweeted (Check out Pinshape) I did not get a thanks or anything - This is considered very bad etiquette in the world of Twitter - and it will not show up on any reports or metrics.

Sincerely,

Lawrence

Hi Lawrence,

Thanks for more feedback. I think I’m missing something about the Pinshape link vs the 3DShare link affecting views on each platform though… why do you think one is making more of a difference than the other?

We certainly appreciate you helping to spread the word about Pinshape, so thank you for that. Every extra person that knows about it helps for sure. Unfortunately, with a really limited amount of time for each initiative we are looking after, sometimes things fall through the cracks, kinda the curse of a start up. We’ll be sure to be on the lookout for mentions from everyone in the Pinshape community going forward.

Nick

Hi Lawrence,

Karen here! Saw your Tweets, and I usually do retweet things from our designers. Went through your past Tweets on us and realized that the reason why they haven’t been showing up on my dashboard is because the @Pinshape tag wasn’t done in a way that actually tags us!

E.g. “Check out Pinshape | Discover and Print 3D Objects https://pinshape.com/ #3dprinting #Karen are you there?” --> You should add the @ before Pinshape so that it appears on my feed. That will notify me that someone tagged us through Hootsuite.

Scrolled further to look for other pinshape tweets and saw:
"In Weed We Trust Medallion @ Pinshape http://buff.ly/1eWiZqW #3dprinting #awesome3dfile " --> I think you accidentally left a space between the @ and Pinshape so that also didn’t show up.

I do track the #3Dprinting tag as often as I can, but as you know, there’s a lot of traffic on there and would be very hard for me to locate specific tweets referring to Pinshape that way. I myself try to include that tag whenever I can (word count dependent), as I’m sure you and other do. In the future, including “@Pinshape” to your tags will ensure I see it!

Definitely appreciating the tweets and you helping to spread the word :slight_smile: Also see you on Google+ a lot as well!

Karen

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The 3D printer reviews is the evolution of printers. It offers you three-dimensional objects. This device is the new trend today. It is interesting and very useful because it produces functional objects.

Are you guys kidding me? This is self-advertisement (twice, by the way) using Pinshape as a platform. Mods, where are you? Are you guys just sitting back letting it die like MMF? That’s cool, if you don’t care, but there are people who jump on here who are legit looking for help. And you guys do nothing? Wow. If you act this way at your job, I can only imagine what you do at home, with your significant other and your children.

No matter what you tell yourself at night, YOU ARE A SHITTY PERSON. There are 12 year olds trying to learn what 3d printing is, and you guys are destroying it. Let this crash and burn, because, really, you guys are bad people now. Worst part is, you know it.

Hello :wave:
Have a nice day
Thanks!!

we can make a action figure with this
lol kidding

I am creating a range of 3d cleaning tools for a game scenario, chainsaw, brushcutter and pressure washer. Once I have finished the project I will share it here… there is a lot of artist here, I’m glad :wink: