How to Set Up Triberr in 7 Easy Steps

Triberr is an interesting platform that I discovered last year.  It really started from my search for the answer for “How the heck do all these other bloggers have so much to Tweet about?”  That’s when I started to do some of my own digging and I noticed something very interesting.  A lot of the content being shared on Twitter had a very similar format.  It was always a [Title] [Link] via [Twitter Handle].  Interesting…

Stelle di Stelle – 3 Michelin Star Cuisine at Harrods http://t.co/EyLRWaGVxy via @LuxuryColumnist

— Dan and Casey (@ACruisingCouple) January 11, 2015

My hunt continued and eventually I discovered it was this little tool called Triberr.  No doubt you’ve heard about Triberr but the one thing I constantly hear from other bloggers is “I don’t get it” or “How do I set it up?”

Let me help you see the light!

What is Triberr

First things first.  What exactly is Triberr?

The root word behind Triberr is tribe and that’s what the platform is about.  The platform gives you the ability to surround yourself with other bloggers to build a “tribe”.  With this core community, these like-minded bloggers rally behind each other and support each other by sharing your content on Twitter.

When you strip it all down, it’s a Twitter sharing engine.

How does Triberr work?

Here’s a simple break down of what Triberr does:

• Your profile is connected to your blog’s RSS feed and your Twitter account
• Start your own tribe or join another tribe
• Everyone in the tribe will automatically (thanks to RSS) pick up any tribe member’s new blog posts
• Other tribe members can decide whether they want to share it or not
• When they share it, the post is automatically added to your personal share queue where you can decide how often Triberr posts are shared on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn (most useful for Twitter)
• What makes it all work is that other users are incentivized to share because if they don’t, eventually tribe “chiefs” will kick them out to maintain a healthy group

Triberr Memberships

There is a paid membership for Triberr but most will start off with the free tier.  Here’s are the main differences you need to be aware of:

Free tier:

• Maximum of 2 connected blogs
• Can create a maximum of 3 tribes
• Each tribe can have a maximum of 50 members
• 1 tribe member on auto share

Paid tiers (price starts at $8.50 a month and up):

• 4+ connected blogs
• 7+ tribes
• 50+ members per tribe
• 25+ tribe members on auto share

Honestly for most bloggers, the free tier will be more than enough.  Sure it sucks that your tribe can only have 30 people in each one but you make do by creating 3 tribes and join as many as can possibly find that have open spots.

Setting Triberr up in 7 simple steps

The following is a set of step-by-step instructions for how to set up Triberr for your blog.  This assumes you only have one Twitter account and one blog.  Also all sharing you’re looking to do is with Twitter and not any other platform.  These are possible but I wanted to keep things as concise as possible.

1 Sign up

The sign up process is very easy.  Simply create a new account and the connect either your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account.  I would recommend linking to your Twitter account as that is most likely where you will be doing all your sharing.

2  Connecting your blog

During the sign up process, you entered your blog’s URL but you didn’t actually connect it with your blog’s RSS feed.  Without getting too much into RSS, the only thing you need to know that if you’re using WordPress, your RSS feed will most likely be http://yourblog.com/feed/

Main method:

In your account settings -> My Blogs tab, click on the Edit link and type in your RSS feed along with giving your blog a name.

Don’t worry if no posts show up even after you click on “Check feed”.  Triberr will only pick up new posts that come out after you’ve linked your blog.

Plugin method (better):

Alternatively, you can download a WordPress plugin to install on your blog.  The link to the plugin is right under account settings -> My Blogs tab.  Look for “Get Plugin”.

Advantage of installing the plugin is that Triberr will automatically pick the first image in your post and add it to the previews that it provides to other tribe members.  This is good because articles are always more enticing to share if there’s a photo attached to it.

Other bloggers have mentioned that this may slow down your blog.  I haven’t had this issue but do keep that in mind if you’re noticing speed issues.

3 Creating your first tribe

Under the Tribes tab in the main menu, you’ll have the ability to create your first of 3 tribes.

It’s really easy.  All you have to do is click on “+ New Tribe” and a window will pop up asking you to give the tribe a name and pick a category.

After that your tribe is created.

Note that tribes you create will always have your profile photo on it based on the social account you signed up with.  This cannot be changed.  You can however make changes a few additional things.

Add a tribe description:

• Click on Settings on the top right corner to open up a pop up box to type in your tribe’s description

Add a cover photo to your tribe:

• Click on Profile to be taken to the tribe’s profile page
• Hover over the cover photo to see the upload button appear and upload an image of your choice from your computer

Remember you can create up to 3 tribes.  What most people will do is use the other 2 tribes as overflow.  So for example, since “Travel Blog Breakthrough” tribe can only have a maximum of 30 members, once more people want to join, direct them to “Travel Blog Breakthrough 2” tribe and so on.

4  Populating your tribe

Now that you have your first tribe, how do you get people to join?  Well there are a few ways to go about it.

• Use the search bar at the top to see who else you know is on Triberr.  Once you’ve found them, go to their profile page and click on the big green “Send Invite” button.
• Once you’ve found a few travel bloggers, see what tribes they belong to and start inviting everyone.
• Go to your community (Facebook group) and just put out an open call out for folks to join your Tribe or see if there’s an existing post where someone’s asked about Triberr.

5  Joining tribes

Just as important as creating tribes is the joining of tribes.  The more tribes you’re a member of, the more exposure your blog posts will get seen in people’s stream and thus higher probability of being shared.

Member vs. follower

The keyword here is member because if you’re not a member, you’re just a follower.  Your posts only get shared to a tribe if you are a member and not if you’re a follower.

Finding tribes to join

The hardest part about joining tribes is 1) finding tribes to join and 2) finding tribes that aren’t already maxed out at 30 members.

There’s no real secret here other than to start seeking out tribes like they are your prey.  I find the best way to do this is just to see where other popular travel bloggers are members of.

For example, if you go to my Going Awesome Places profile page, scroll down and look to the right side and you’ll see every single tribe I’m a member of.  What I would do is just go to every single one of those groups and see if they have openings (i.e. less than 30 members).

When you go to a group that you’re not a part of, click on the blue “Follow” button.  This will then take you to the tribe’s member page.  A pop up will automatically appear and basically all this is asking is whether you’d like to ask the owner to make you a full time member.  Click on “Request a promotion” to get Triberr to send an e-mail to the owner.  After that it’s up to the owner to decide whether they want to make you a member.  Otherwise, you’ll just remain a follower.

If a tribe is maxed at 30, it also doesn’t hurt to leave a message in the “Conversations” tab.  Ask nicely and if you’re lucky, when the owner does a list clean-out, you’ll be added.

For starters, join my Travel Blog Breakthrough tribe and Going Awesome Places tribe!

6 Managing your account settings

This probably could’ve been an earlier step but here goes.  There are a few things you’ll want to do with your account’s settings to make sure everything is set up properly.

Account Settings -> Profile Tab

• Fill out your bio, website and time zone

Account Settings -> Imports

• Set Post Descriptions to “Keep original descriptions from RSS feed” just so your RSS feed tells Triberr how descriptions should look instead of Triberr guessing

Account Settings -> Streams

• This section is extremely important because this determines how often your queue of shared posts gets shared out
• Maximum frequency Triberr will share tribemates posts you approve – Basically tell Triberr to share posts on Twitter every __ hour.
• Stream Usability – The default here is to “Hover to share posts”.  I’m not a big fan of this because Iyou could accidentally put my mouse over the Share button and it’ll automatically add it to the queue.  Changing this to “Click to share posts” just gives you more control.
• Show Images in the Stream – When you’re viewing content from your tribes (stream), will the feature image show up.
• Show posts from people who share your content on top? – I have this at “Yes” but if you don’t want to have any preferential treatment, you can change it to “No”.

Profile -> Cover photo

• Just like your tribes, view your profile page and hover over the default cover photo image of that cyclist.
• An upload button will appear on the top right corner.  Click it to upload your very own image so it looks like you cared to at least set up your profile properly.

7 Start Sharing

After setting things up, creating your own tribe and joining a few other tribes, you should be all set to start sharing other people’s content on your Twitter account.

There are a few places to do this.

1. In the main menu, there’s a Stream tab.  This is the main home page of Triberr when you log in.  This will show you a complete stream of new posts picked up for all the tribes you’re either a member or follower of.
2. If there are partial to certain tribes, you can just as easily go directly to the tribe’s page and start sharing under the Activity tab

Again, sharing is super easy.  If you find a post that you like, simply click on the green Share button and it’ll be added to the queue where it’ll then get automatically tweeted out based on the interval you set in the previous step.

Triberr etiquette

1. If you’re part of a tribe, share people’s content.
2. If you’re MIA from sharing for a long time, you may or will be removed from a tribe
3. As a manager of a tribe, you totally have the power of booting members out of the tribe if they’re not participating.  My general guideline is that if someone hasn’t shared any content in >1 month, they’re out.
4. If you know you’re going to be on vacation or you just won’t be able to share for awhile for some reason, leave a comment on the tribe’s page to let the manager know.

Tips and tricks

1. One crappy part about the main stream is that some people may decide to pay to make a particular post “Sticky” (A $5 buy now feature).  I saw this a lot with tribes that were more business of blogging focused.  As a result, my main stream was clogged with all this non-travel related content that I never wanted to share.  Ultimately I had to remove myself from these tribes.
2. You obviously want to maintain membership at all your blogs but you have to realize that the “Last Shared” statistic that tribe chiefs use to determine whether someone has been sharing is calculated on a global level.  So as long as you share in one tribe, all the other tribes will say that you recently just shared.
3. One thing I never got a chance to explain is that Triberr also has an auto-share feature.  When you designate someone on auto-share, anytime they publish a post, you automatically add them to your share queue on Triberr. (screenshot below)
4. As you know, tweets go out automatically and follow the same formula.  What most people don’t know is that after Triberr picks up your new blog post from the RSS feed, you can actually edit the title and even the content if you wanted to.  This way you can be pretty sneaky to control the way the tweet goes out by adding your own hashtags and mention handles.  You can also add your own photo to be the featured image if the first image in the post isn’t particularly eye catching.  (see screenshot below)
5. Add your blog name to your profile name to make it easy to search.  Search on Triberr is pretty dumb because it only searches by people’s names.  Most people just put their real name so you’d have to know the blogger’s full name to find them but if you put your blog name in there as well, you become that much more searchable.  For example, I’m “Will Tang @ Going Awesome Places”.

When viewing a stream, simply hover over a user’s profile photo and this will pop up for auto-share.

For your own posts, you can go in and edit the title and add your own “first image” like so.

Why I like Triberr

I’ll end off this already information packed post with 3 takeaways about why Triberr is worth your time.

1. It honestly doesn’t take much time at all.  Just check in every couple of days, build up a nice queue of posts and you’re good.
2. You’re never forced to share content.  The content that you share from Triberr is your decision and therefore that much more curated and relevant to your audience.
3. Let your content spread like wildfire.  Second to Facebook sharing, this is an amazing passive way to get your content shared through Twitter immediately after a post is published.

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