Triberr may be one of the best tools in your blogging toolbox that you’ve never heard of.
For the uninitiated, Triberr is a online service that encourages members to share each other’s new blog posts. They have been working on improving the service and attempting to address some of the issues that arise with any startup. I spoke with founder Dino Dogan about where Triberr is headed and he shared some exciting developments. Before we get into what’s new with Triberr, let’s review what Triberr is, how to get started, and we’ll also be sure to cover all the benefits Triberr offers businesses.
What is Triberr?
It helps to understand that Triberr is based on the concept of primitive tribes. When you create an account, you automatically have your own tribe of which you are both member and chief. Go to http://www.triberr.com to get started.
If you join other tribes, or invite others to join your tribe, the other members will be your tribemates. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on the number of tribes you can join.
When you first create your account, you will go through the standard steps of uploading an image and typing in a brief bio. You should then connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. More on those in a moment.
The most critical step in your initial setup is connecting your blog. You must provide a working RSS feed for your blog so that the Triberr site will know when you have a new blog post. Your new posts will begin to show up in your My Posts section, showing you how much that post has been shared and other details.
How to use Triberr
Once you have your initial setup completed, it’s time to start building your tribe. The more tribemates that you have, the more people will be sharing your great content. In the left sidebar, click on Tribes. A pop-up window will open displaying any tribes that you’re currently a member of, and an opportunity to click on Browse All Tribes. You can add one or more categories to find tribes along your interests, then sift through the existing tribes. You can see how many members are in the tribe, recent feeds, and “Tribal Reach” which is the combined social followers of all tribe members.
When you find a tribe that you’re interested in, click on Follow Tribe. Now, it’s important to understand the distinction between Follower and Member (or Blogger). If you follow a tribe, you will see posts from tribe members in your Tribal Stream, but they will not see yours. Following a tribe is useful if you are looking for a particular kind of content to share on your own networks, but may not need those members to share your own posts. Typically, though, you would follow a tribe as a precursor to becoming a member.
Once you’re following a tribe, you will be able to see the Tribe Council which is the tribe’s discussion area. This is an area where you can meet fellow tribemates, ask questions, and request membership. Unless you’ve previously been invited to join the tribe, you will need to ask that the Tribe Chief invite or upgrade you to a full member. (If you’re interested in Content Marketing and Technology, follow our tribe!)
When you’ve been accepted as a tribe member, all of your tribemates will now see your new posts in their own Tribal Stream.
After you have joined a few tribes, it will time to start sharing. It’s important to understand that Triberr is based on sharing and reciprocating. If you never share any of your tribemate’s content, you will likely be removed from the tribe. Now, that said, I believe Triber to be an extremely valuable and convenient tool for finding and sharing great content. I instruct my clients that their social media activity should be a combination of their own content and other people’s content, with the majority coming from other sources. Rather than spend a lot of time reviewing other websites, why not let Triberr bring you fantastic content from your tribemates?
Click on your Tribal Stream. If you just joined Triberr, you won’t see anything yet – you have to be a tribe member or following some tribes, and your tribemates need to have had a chance to post some new blog entries. After a short time, you will begin to see teasers for articles that your tribemates have written. All you have to do is glance through them and either Approve them or remove them from your stream. If you approve them, they will be posted to your connected social networks on your schedule. You can vote up posts that you really like, leave comments, and click to open in a new window if you’re interested in reading more.
I recommend reading the full posts from each of your tribemates initially so that you can get a sense for their writing style and content. Once you get to know them, you will gain a comfort level with them and feel confident sharing their content with your followers without reading the entire article yourself first.
Make sure that you go to your Settings (located under your name in the upper right corner) and adjust your connections and sharing preferences. First, decide if you want to share your content to Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter. Whether or not you do will depend on your strategy for those networks. By turning on sharing, that means that if you Approve a post, it will be shared to each of those networks unless you uncheck a network for that particular post.
Periodically check your Blog Settings and make sure that your feed is still set to be assigned to all tribes. It seems as though new tribes that you join are not automatically added.
Finally, click on Content Settings to adjust whether or not you want other members to be able to reblog your posts, and decide on a posting frequency. How often you share will depend on how many of your own posts you are sharing each day. Since we recemmend a 80%/20% ratio, if you’re posting two of your own links a day, you should try to post 8 links from others, so you’ll want to share from Triberr every 3 hours and make sure that you’re approving enough content to keep that schedule.
Triberr Developments
Triberr has offered a paid membership called Prime which allowed members to grow their tribes past a 30 member limit, as well as start special tribes called Atomic Tribes. In an Atomic Tribe, there is only one member, you, and all followers are set to automatically share your content without taking the time to approve it. Atomic Tribes are fantastic once you have established yourself as an authoritive writer that other people will want to automatically share new content from.
One issue though that has been brought up repeatedly is that not everyone posts the same quality or amount of content. Some people are prolific writers and therefore get their content shared far more often than they share yours. Worse, some individuals started creating lower-quality content in an effort to create more posts and get more shares. Other sites have multiple authors from guest posts and are similarly creating far more activity than the typical blogger. Finally, some members were noticed to be simply creating blog posts from other people’s content.
In an effort to resolve and address some of these issues, the folks at Triberr have begun experimenting with share limits on members. Currently, free members are able to share up to 14 posts a week. For most bloggers, it seems like that limit should be more than enough, as it would allow them to write two posts per day every day of the week.
Triberr is aso implementing a Prime LITE membership option which will not be quite as expensive, and offer an upgraded number of shares, along with a few other benefits. The details are still being discussed and may change, but we were offered a sneak peak at what the current thinking for the plans and benefits are.
Dino Dogan is the founder of Triberr and an active member and blogger in his own right. In talking about Triberr, one of the upcoming developments that he was very exicted to share was Brand Pages. Brands will soon have the opportunity to create their own Pages that will be somewhat akin to Atomic Tribes, with some additional features and benefits. These Pages will be fee-based and will therefore be the first paid brand pages. He went on to explain that their goals for Triberr for 2013 are to continue to roll out more features and benefits. They hope to expand their staff to fulfil those goals, as he believes “bloggers are the celebrities of the future.” Dino thinks that brands want to, and need to, tap into that power and influence and is working on making Triberr a platform for businesses to accomplish that.
Triberr Benefits
We covered a lot of details in this post, so I thought it would be a good idea to summarize the benefits of using Triberr.
Blog Amplification
Each time you create a new blog post, your Triberr tribemates will begin sharing that post to their social networks. Twitter is the most common, but you will also get some shares to Facebook and LinkedIn. The sharing will generally start within a few hours and may continue for a couple of days, depending on each tribemate’s current share queue.
Social Media Content
Triberr tribemates will provide you with a constant, excellent source of great content that you can share on your social networks, which your followers will find interesting and appreciate.
Brand Recognition
One of the more subtle benefits to being a member of Triberr is that, as your tribemates share more and more of your content, your brand will begin to be more recognized by those tribemates and their own followers. There are people and other brands using Triberr that literally have tens of thousands of followers. When they shre your content, there’s a certain amount of validation and recognition that is then transferred to your own brand.
I recommend that you start your Triberr membership immediately. Let me know if you have and questions or issues. If you’re already using Triberr, what do you think so far?