Triberr- initial thoughts

Twitter is currently buzzing with discussion of a new social media marketing tool called Triberr. Triberr describes itself as “the reach multipler” and goes on to say that it allows bloggers who tweet their posts to reach much larger audiences without spending 6-12 months building up their SEO.

What this means in practice is your blog posts get tweeted by all the members in your group (Triberr call this group a Tribe)over the course of the day it’s originally posted. Triberr takes the details from your blogs RSS feed, so it’s not dependent on a tweet from you originally advertising the post. It spaces out the posting of tweets too, so you wont find ten plugs for your blog post all happening at once.

You can see from the example below how a Triberr tweet is constructed and it’s interesting to note that it doesn’t mention Triberr at all. You’ve probably seen a few of these in your twitter stream and haven’t even noticed them.

A song for you dear reader twrt.me/uh8229via @daddacool

Title of blog post -> URL -> via original twitter user

The size of a tribe is limited by it’s founder, they can run to over 100, but Dean (@daddynatal) set up the UK Dads tribe with a limit of 7 people. There were sensible reasons for this, which help highlight some of the potential issues with Triberr.

If you and your fellow tribe members have a lot of follower over-lap, you may come close to offending some of them with spammy effective retweets. Seeing the same post promoted in the same way by a dozen or more people isn’t going to win you any friends.

Unless you know all the bloggers in your tribe really well, can you genuinely vouch that every post you’re auto tweeting will be of the sort of quality you’re happy to endorse? Equally , can you say you’ll agree with the opinion in every piece you’re automatically tweeting about? Personally, if there were 6 Silent Sunday posts being plugged, I”d be unhappy.

You can turn off the automatic tweeting but if you do that, you run the danger of offending your fellow tribe members. At it’s heart Triberr is about reciprocity, and unless you’re blogging ten times a day against other members once or twice a week, filtering content is going to cause ructions.

Some might argue that the whole concept of Triberr is a con in itself, a shortcut to a wider audience that should be earnt via quality writing and hard work in (social) networking. Whilst I can see the merit of this argument, I’ve lost count of the number of tweets I see promoting things in my timeline that end with the words “PLS RT”(please retweet), which is attempting pretty much the same thing, albeit in an informal manner.

There’s also the matter of bones, the Triberr virtual currency. While the site is still in beta, there isn’t a premium function distinction but I’m sure once it’s out of beta, a lot of the more useful functions are going to be pay only.

Triberr itself is still very much in beta, the developers are listening to community input and it doubtlessly does increase the reach of your blog posts. How has it worked so far for me? With two other members in my tribe I have a theoretical reach of 3,500 users (including my own 867 followers). So far I’ve had an additional 47 hits over 3 blog posts I can directly attribute to Triberr- the Triberr dashboard gives you this information. So it’s hardly earth-shattering but it’s early days yet.

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