Pages

Tiberr OVERLOAD! #promotip


Triberr Overload! #promotip


A few months ago, Rachelle graciously made a quick visit here and informed us all about Triberr and how to use it! Today she's back and giving us an update on the changes of Triberr.
I posted several months ago about Triberr, a service that allows a group of people to read and share blog posts through Twitter. When I first started using Triberr, oh, not so long ago, I started my own tribe, Indie Authors and filled it with people I knew from blogging and critiquing. Since my tribemates oftentimes knew each other from other venues, we had a small and intimate, well, tribal feel. We'd visit and comment on posts as well as forwarded to our Twitter streams.

I always had an open door policy and kept my tribe healthy by encouraging reciprocation. Some members lost interest and left. Others who did not want to spam their Twitter followers also left. Back then it cost "bones" to invite a member who was already in Triberr. They called it inbreeding. Even though chiefs had to purchase bones, it was a good system because people would think before inviting someone to their tribe. Tribes were also capped at thirty members.

Triberr Explosion
In September, the bone system was discontinued. Suddenly you can invite people without cost. A Prime membership was created where chiefs could have tribes with up to 150 members. Predictably, an invitation explosion ensued. People I didn't know were inviting me. I was inviting others I didn't know. A new feature called "Follower" status was introduced. This allowed people to lurk outside of the tribe, share the posts, and ask to gain membership.

Is this a good thing? If I look at stats I could be thrilled. I went from:

to this:

But along the way, I lost my sense of community. My stream became clogged with new faces and new people. I diligently checked out their blogs and shared their posts. I dialed my share schedule to the maximum allowed (3 posts an hour). Do the math! 3 posts an hour = 72 posts a day maximum. I now have 269 tribemates. Some of them post multiple times a day. Everytime I log on, my stream is full and I'm always behind.

Some of my tribemates have time sensitive posts, a giveaway or free event. This could get lost in the queue and not sent until days into the future. With the pile of unsent but approved posts, Triberr's database became overloaded. They started aging out posts, dumping packets into the bit bucket. I started missing my initial tribemates' posts only to find them gone by the time I got to it.

The intimate small tribe had grown into a communal hive. I no longer had time to visit and comment, just click, approve, click, approve. And what happened to my twitter feed? goo.gl, goo.gl, goo.gl ... ad nauseum.

The million dollar question - Did you blog hits improve?
No! Even with the increased tribemates, increased sharing and 24 by 7 posts, my blog pageviews did not increase like they did when I first joined Triberr. My Alexa rating is still in the 360,000 range, and I did not see an increase in average pageviews.

Why is that? Simple. My tribemates were also on overload. They could not keep up with the multitude, the flood, the deluge of posts. Their queues were backed up and posts were dropped after five days. And now that Triberr has instituted a daily 100 post limit (still > 72/daily potential), even more of my blog posts will submerge into the ocean of timed-out posts.

What to do?
I'm taking back my tribal roots. Triberr has always had a "Filter" feature. I had always set it to "Show All Tribes." Because I am now limited to 100 posts a day, I will start with the posts from my two personal tribes: "Indie Authors" and "Writer's Karma." I will get in as many posts as I can of my other tribes and pay attention to the reciprocality statistic. Those who have shared more will be shared first. Then the folks I'm even with. If this doesn't work, I will drop out of tribes until I get my tribemate number down to where it is manageable.
So that's my Triberr story. What about you? Do you like the new changes? The supertribes? Are you a paying Prime member? What do you think of the impersonal automatic sharing feature? And is all of this defeated when you can only share 72 posts a day?


Be sure to check out Rachelle's blog for more great tips on writing!
Check out Rachelle's novels for some really great reads!!

15 comments:

  1. This has come at just the right time as I am looking into the system and maybe joining a couple tribes. However I am worried about the potential for spam and how little value that would have on content and the work I would put in.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David, there is such a fine line between spam and true content. I believe in definitely joining tweet teams and triberr so you can have the same give and take with your members.

      Delete
  2. I use Triberr, and its helped me get over 12,000 visits per month. While I can send 72 post per hour, I only send 1 per hour. . . period. Yes it means a few things may not get shared - but I don't share everything in my feed anyway. I am selective about my shares so that I can give my followers what they are looking for and not just random stuff. It works for me still because I haven't changed my OWN guidelines.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do love the reach Triberr gets me, so a lot of my tweets are inspirational tweets or a tweet or two about my books. Some people might consider my books tweets spam, but I consider it reaching readers.

      Delete
  3. Rachelle, you invited me into Triberr and helped me get going and our paths have been similar (although you are currently 4x my reach). I have recently dropped out of tribes with too many posts that I felt were not of interest to my followers. I have lost tribemates in my own tribes because they felt the pressure of keeping up. Like you, I don't think my stats have improved much and I wonder where Triberr will go next.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Donna, I too dropped out of a few tribes because it did just get to be way too much. I didn't like some of the tweets going out and weren't right for my followers. It was hard to try and keep up with so many. I want to stay in my Indie Author group and spend the rest of the time writing!

      Delete
  4. Hi Rachelle (I'm in your Indie Authors tribe and 7 others).
    Yep, it's a toughie. I only want to share certain types of content to my followers so I need to check the blog posts as they come up. That takes time. On the plus side I've seen a good surge of page views on my blog for new posts thanks to Triberr and I also find some of the tribemate content personally interesting. I'm getting about 43 shares and maybe ten times that in page views per post. To be honest I generate more blog traffic and comments than Triberr by cycling my previous blog posts randomnly through Feed140 (automated tweet stream). That gives me low hundreds of page views per day across all my posts and helps to share whatever 'evergreen' content I have.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't have that many people in my tribes, so it hasn't been an issue. I'd actually like to add a few more, but I still want to be picky about it. I have a ton of bones burning a hole in my pocket, but see no reason to splurge for PRIME membership. I feel spammy already, so I'll keep it to just a few and add when I have quality people. Happy to be a part of Tonya's tribe!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, Jessica! I'm so glad you stopped by. I did belong to too many tribes. When they started out it fit my needs and had a purpose. NOW...I had to re-evaluate what tribe was truly what I wanted to send to my followers.

      Delete
  6. Thank you again for inviting my to your Tribe! I am having fun. Recently I did add a third tribe and I know what you mean. My reach is about 300,000 but I am good with that for now. Some days all the posts are great! A lot to put out there at once

    ReplyDelete
  7. I see a lot of people complaining about the "quality" of their retweets, but I don't get it. I don't see the average follower on Twitter caring about such things. Twitter is about randomness, so I take that stance on Triberr mostly.

    I share just about anything (though the majority of my tribemates are writers), and I get retweets from the most random stuff. I get the occasional complaint, and I'm sure I get a few unfollows from it, but I have more than 7,000 followers and climbing. I'm not hurting by being generous with my shares.

    Because of the recent onslaught, though, I have begun to be a little more picky. I share a lot more than 72 per day. I use Buffer to send a hundred or more, not to mention some sent via Triberr directly.

    Do I get shares in return? Yes and no. A really good post gets around 200 shares out of about 900 tribemates, which is about 22%. Because of that I have been using filtering techniques to weed through the list some.

    I've also begun to use Feed140 and am seeing a rise in traffic from that source.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good information here, Masquerade! I love that you have a handle on what is and is not working for you. Thanks!

      Delete
  8. I use triberr and have been added to a super group which pushed my reach to 3.5M. Yes, I noticed a huge increase in blog views and activity, as well as Twitter followers. However, there are a ton of posts in my super group which have absolutely nothing to do with who I am, what I do, or my platform, and I simply can't keep up. So, like Rachelle, I hit my smaller, more intimate tribes first, which are the ones which contain other authors and like-minded folks, then I go through my super group's posts. Masquerade Crew is in my super group, as well as a lot of other authors and writer-associated bloggers. Those are the folks who get my attention first in the super group. Sorry to say, but if a post has nothing to do with my platform and doesn't add to who I am, I have to X it. I don't want to spam my followers with information that has nothing to do with writing unless it's interesting. With that said, I have found some truly interesting posts in my super group that are not writing-related. Even if I don't share them, I read them. Some give me ideas for my own posts, others give me fuel for stories, while others enterain and still others provide relevant information about being in business for myself. And I don't sweat it if I can't get to posts and they are deleted from my stream. I can only do what I can do. I'm not super human. LOL.

    Oh, regarding the 100-max. I can approve up to 100 posts at a time, but then I have to wait a while until some of those posts go up on Twitter before I can approve more. For example, I spent some time approving posts up to 100 earlier today. I just went back in and was able to approve a few more, back up to 100. I'll have posts popping up on Twitter for a couple of days.

    ReplyDelete

ANSWERING A READER QUESTION

AMAZON COZY MYSTERY BOOK CLUB: https://amzn.to/35jiXar GOODREADS COZY MYSTERY AMAZON BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION: https://www.goodreads.com/topic...