A Slice of Orange

A lot of friends make comments to me like, “You’re always on Twitter.” Well, the truth is, I’m not really on Twitter all the time. My Twitter feed is mostly the result of me sharing the blog posts of fellow tribe mates on a site called Triberr.

If you’re not familiar with Triberr.com, I’ll try to explain, though there are people who can do a better job of it. Triberr is a website where bloggers band together in tribes to share each other’s blog posts. Once you get your blog registered and join a tribe or two, your posts automatically appear in the Tribal Streams of your tribe mates where they can share your post on their Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook feeds. What it means is that your blog posts will get tweeted a lot more than you could manage on your own. (Most people primarily use Twitter for their feeds, as Triberr can quickly overwhelm a Facebook timeline, and I don’t recommend doing so.)

So how do you get started?

First step is to set up your account, which you can do using your Twitter user name and password. This is what my profile looks like:

As you can see, I’m now in 7 tribes, with a total of 198 Tribemates and a total reach of 1 million. And I’ve passed on invitations to join additional tribes. This is all I can handle at the moment.

Once you have your profile set up, go to Account >> Settings >> My Blogs to add your blogs. For this you will need to know the URL for your blog’s RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s the way your blog gets shared over the Internet. If you don’t have one, you can easily acquire an RSS feed address using feedburner.com and other similar services. Once you’ve added the information, your account settings look like this:

If you find that Triberr isn’t picking up your blog posts in a timely fashion, you can go to this page and click on Check Feed to update the site. The blue button on the left is to Assign a Tribe to your blog. If you have more than one blog, you can only assign one to each blog. Before I consolidated my websites and blogs into one site, I had to split up my tribes by blog. Now the Reading Room Blog goes to all my tribes and the old Flights of Fancy has none, though I haven’t deleted it, just in case I ever need it again. Yes, I even hoard blogs.

Next step is to add your Social Networks to your account. I chose to only use Twitter, but Facebook and LinkedIn are also possible.

How do you join a tribe?

Triberr says:

Start by following the tribe. As a follower, you’ll be able to participate in the community and share member’s posts.

After a week as a follow we’ll email the Chief to let them how much content you’ve shared.

The Chief can choose to promote you to a full fledged member, then your content will be shared by the rest of the tribe.

But first you have to find the tribe. You can try searching at Triberr, but it really helps if you know the name of a tribe or a tribe sponsor. Frankly, I haven’t found Triberr’s search function to be very helpful.

You might start with our Southern California Writers of Romance tribe, of which I happen to be the chief, and which happens to be open to new members. If a tribe is filled, the page will advise you of that fact. You can still Follow the tribe, and if an opening comes up, it will usually go to someone who has been following the tribe and sharing their posts. 

This gives you an idea of what a tribal stream looks like. Each blog post appears with the avatar of the blogger at the top. Use the green Share button to add a particular post to your Twitter feed. You can schedule posts to go out as often as every ten minutes or as slowly as every 24 hours. Something in between is probably best. If you hover your cursor over the blogger’s avatar, Triberr will tell you how many posts that blogger shared and wrote in the last week, including whether or not that person shared your posts. If someone isn’t sharing regularly, you are not obligated to share their posts. You can use the little blue Hide button to make their post disappear from your stream. If someone is really bad about not sharing, hit the Mute button and their posts won’t appear in your stream until you undo the Mute. (This is on your Tribes Overview page.)

I hope this explanation is helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

Linda McLaughlin
Website/Blog: http://lindalyndi.com
Twitter: @LyndiLamont