Triberr Basics for the Beginner

I have to admit, joining new social media networking sites can be daunting, especially for a writer, whose time is precious when you’d rather be writing than spending all day checking emails and touching base with each individual media outlet. It’s one reason I have yet to join Pinterest because I know I’d get hooked looking at pretties and sparklies, filling folders with favorite books, flowers, butterflies, cats or finding handsome men to represent my heroes and beautiful women I think favor my heroines.

I did recently make the foray into Triberr though and unfortunately, I didn’t read up on it before I joined, so I’m constantly learning as I go. I wasn’t even sure what Triberr was about except that other authors were starting to use it.

It can be a bit confusing when you first join, especially if you haven’t taken the time to read up on the tutorials and guides on AllTriberr.com. I wasn’t even aware of this separate yet connected entity until awhile after I joined. There are explanations of certain features as you work your way through the set up, but they still have glitches and features I'm not 100% clear about. Of course, I jumped in headfirst rather than reading all their posts about the hows, wheres, whens and whys of the place, so as I said, there’s definitely a learning curve.

The main gist of Triberr is to join or create tribes with like-minded bloggers who enjoy similar blogging themes. Mine, of course, is writing related- Taryn Raye’s Scribbling with Heart. You share your fellow tribemates blog posts- in turn, they share yours, and therefore, you will have a larger, more powerful reach concerning your blog content. One of the best parts- you can go and approve all the current blog posts in the morning and as the day moves along, those posts are automatically sent in intervals whether you’re online or not (more in on that in a minute).

As for inviting others- I'd like to have more members, but you start with only 100 bones and each invite you send or accept spends 15 bones unless you invite someone from the outside who is not a member at all. I have found this is not necessarily the case as I invited outside and it still cost bones so I’m not sure what happened there. I am aware that the site is still in the process of rewriting certain aspects so it will run better and perhaps that’s simply a downfall of getting in on the “ground floor” so to speak- there are glitches in the system that might be unavoidable.

At the moment, I only have so many "bones" that I can spend on adding tribemates. I’ve had to become more discerning when it comes to requests I’ve received. I'm still new to it myself and from what I gather, it seems there used to be a way to "earn" more bones by doing things on the site and helping others by giving them "karma," but at the moment they don't have a way to do that. From a few of the topics in the main forums or "bonfires" it seems some members figured out a way to earn more bones than they should have been allotted by doing that, so they shut it down to everyone on account of a few bad apples.

Right now, the only other way to get more bones is to buy them with real money. You can get 150 for $10, but because it costs 15 bones to invite someone and 15 of their bones to join a tribe as well, you end up going through bones quickly. It makes getting more people in your tribe frustrating when you get down to not having enough to add someone when they request to join your tribe or when you find someone you want to add but can't afford to.

I hope they fix that so it will be easier to get bones an alternative way. I can’t afford to buy more bones with real money to add people all the time. It's an added expense to my pocketbook that I can't afford and I’m sure its that way for a lot of members. If I can't earn more bones, then it will stunt the growth of my Tribe and therefore, my social reach. That’s the main goal of being a member of Triberr- the more people you connect to through your tribe, and other tribes you might join, helps grow the "audience" who sees the blogs you post and that gets more attention to your books and your "business."

The part of sharing other tribemates blogs isn't too hard once you figure out how to go through and approve the current blog posts from everyone in your Tribal Stream so those will post to Twitter at intervals. I have mine set so that once I approve all the current new blogs, they'll post approximately every 20 minutes or so. At first I worried about this because I didn’t want to set it to post constantly, but soon I discovered it doesn’t post in one fell swoop, but one individual blog post per 20 minutes which is the minimum amount of time. I think you can set it to post up to every 120 minutes, so you don't annoy fellow Twitter users or flood your Twitter Feed like someone spamming it.

The thing I like about it most is that you get a chance to see many different blogs and you can comment on them if you want or just simply share them to your Twitter for others to see. You're supposed to be able to post them to Facebook too, but for some reason, when I connected it to my Facebook profile, it wasn't posting anything at all to it from Triberr but they may still be working the bugs out of it since it's a new option. Or it could be that I don’t really need it to feed to Facebook since my posts on Twitter feeds to Facebook already and perhaps there was a application conflict.

They've also recently added a new feature on there too so you can see how often, within the last 30 days, your fellow tribemates share blog posts. Sadly, some don't share their tribemates posts at all, even if they post their own blogs for others to share. There's bound to be some "weeding" eventually that will go on among tribes for those who aren't considerate of the other members and fail to share. I have a few people who haven't shared at all in the last 30 days, but I can't remember if I've seen blogs from them come through the stream. If they see it post on Twitter and share or retweet it directly from there, it doesn't count on Triberr, so it's somewhat hard to know if they are sharing via a different route or not.

All in all, I'm still deciding whether to warm to it or not. It does have advantages and disadvantages just as you do with any other social networking site. I love knowing more people see my blog posts but I’m aware that bugs and maintenance issues abound with any form of media that is ever-changing and attempting to come up with newer, better, faster ways to assist their target membership and audience.

If you do blog a lot though, if you feel you have content worth sharing with other writers and you don’t mind sharing an eclectic variety of other writers’ blogs, then finding a “writing” tribe on Triberr is definitely a good format to help you spread your reach and grow your audience.

Post by Taryn Raye