Every day there is some new social media program that is the next big thing. As everybody wanted to be one of the first thousand people on facebook or twitter, you may be game for it. Many of these programs fizzle; some have niche ardent supporters and other cross the tipping point.
By design, Tribrr is a niche social media platform that can be very effective and influential or it can be annoying and spammy. Tribrr is a tool that combines the RSS feed from your blog to groups of people on twitter or ‘tribes’. You have to be asked to join Tribrr, you can’t simply sign up and watch the readers come.
People can go to Tribrr and look for a group of people that your blog would be a good fit for. Some of these tribes have entry qualifications, such as a certain number of twitter followers or may have limitations on the number of people in a certain blogging segment that can join. Once you’re sent the invitation to join that tribe you’ll plug in your RSS feed and any blog posts you do will be automatically re-tweeted to the people in your tribe’s twitter accounts.
It has the power to magnify your reach a tremendous amount. However, it’s also a very controversial tool that has many people claiming that it’s turning twitter into a spam tool, in addition to watering down the quality of blog posts. Both of these statements can be true.
Moderation and group size
To be fair any social media tool can be used for the power of spam. There is a way to take Tribrr off of automatic, which will allow you to give the tweets a quick look before you send them from your account. This is especially helpful if you have people in your tribe who do giveaways and coupons. They tend to post more often than other bloggers and too many coupon tweets will jam your twitter stream very quickly.
If the group is smaller and you trust most of the tweets coming from the tribe then you can leave it on automatic. Personally, I’m in two tribes, one is on automatic all the time and the other one is automatic some of the time. The smaller tribe is automatic and the larger tribe is semi-automatic.
Don’t forget to tweet
Your twitter volume will increase by leaps and bounds. Don’t stop commenting, interacting or posting what you used to post on twitter. If you fail to do what you’ve been doing that made you successful then your twitter stream will be nothing but generated blog spam.
Don’t post too often on your blog
Your blog traffic will increase! Don’t be tempted by these numbers and then start posting twice a day or more; unless you can handle the increase in posts. If the quality of the posts can handle it, then go for it. However, some people’s posts have gone down in quality. They’ve written a couple sentences about a news article; clipped segments of it into their post and linked to the original article.
The Bad News
Lots of people aren’t fans of Tribrr. Because the blog posts aren’t organically tweeted out it can be viewed as spammy. Posts like aforementioned one are reasons why people dislike Tribrr.
Many of the people that you follow on twitter follow each other. Because of that, the blog post that you’re RT through Tribrr is also being RT by the people in your tribe. People that aren’t in your tribe will see these RTs for the same blog post and know that they’re computer prompted.
The Bottom line
It’s easy to understand why people love Tribrr and why people don’t like it. If you intend on using it, use it responsibly. The developers of Tribrr are very responsive to issues with the platform and tweak it many times a week. Because of that, they’re dealing with many of these concerns and you should expect changes very often. If you blog, it should be worth you checking out, just consider all of the pros and cons.
