TRIBERR: MAKING TWITTER RELEVANT

Triberr is a third-party platform that integrates beautifully as a bridge between your blog and Twitter. It’s essentially a social media channel exclusively for influencers, where you can network and actively share each other’s content, multiplying your collective reach.

Setting up only takes a few minutes. You can join at triberr.com, set up a profile for free, link your blog, and download their WordPress plugin. Once you’ve activated this plugin, new blog posts you publish will be sent automatically to Triberr’s platform, where a large network of other bloggers and influencers can share your stuff with a single click.

Triberr has a bit of a learning curve to understand and use effectively; but once you do, you’ll find it to be time well invested. Here I’ll do my best to explain the steps to getting set up and leveraging up the platform so that you can get up and running quickly.

The first step is to connect your Twitter account to the Triberr platform. Whilst logged in to Twitter, register through Triberr. Under “Account Settings,” complete all basic

Next click the “My Blogs” tab, and add your blog. Click “Get Plugin” and upload the zipped file to WordPress, or search for and download the Triberr plugin and activate it. This will automatically send every new post you publish to Triberr, where it can be shared by your tribemates.

Once it’s set up, Triberr works in several ways. It acts as a medium that connects your blog posts to other Twitter users. These can be easily shared with one-click in Triberr’s “tribal stream.”

Essentially that means the more tribes you are in the more shares and retweets your posts will get! The second feature, of course, is the ability to share relevant content from other users to your Twitter page. This provides a double benefit: you will never run out of fresh content to share with your followers, and you’ll be able to get onto the radar of other influencers and build relationships in a positive, reciprocal way.

Under the “My Social Networks” tab, you can link your Twitter account and set your sharing frequency to regular intervals (in general, I share a new post from one of my tribemates every eight hours). You can log in to Triberr once or twice a week, and queue up all of your posts in less than ten minutes.

This is an excellent way to curate relevant content to share to your account, and actively sharing ensures that your content is shared in turn.

Again, it’s also a wonderful, non-intrusive way to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche. They see your content, and you share their content, making it a win-win. You can comment on their posts, too, on their blog or within Triberr and build all kinds of valuable relationships that you can leverage later on.

If you check out my Triberr profile, you’ll see that at the time of this writing I’m in over 100 tribes with over 7,000 tribemates and a reach of over 120 million people (by the way, telling someone that you have 120 million of anything is a great way to their attention). Every post I publish can potentially reach a combined following of over 120 million people.

I currently only have about 18,000 actual Twitter followers, but whenever I post a new blog post, I get dozens and dozens of retweets.

Of course, it isn’t *quite* as simple as I’ve made it out to be. When you first join the site, you will find yourself in a grand total of zero tribes, with zero tribemates. You’ll have to start pitching tribes to join, and this will take a bit of time. But it’s an extremely easy process, all it requires is a bit of persistence.

To begin, all we have to do is start searching for tribes using keywords related to a niche, “follow” them, and request a promotion by leaving a comment in the discussion.

You can easily copy and paste the core of the message to numerous tribes in a single go:

“Hi [Tribe Chief], I’d love to request a promotion to this tribe if one is available. I have a large and engaged audience, I’m an active sharer, and always strive to post useful, unique content that your followers will love. Look forward to connecting!”

Always say that you have a large and engaged audience. Any good tribe chief will check to see how many followers you have, because if you have a lot of followers, it adds significant clout to the tribe. Anyone can easily use MassPlanner and get several thousand followers on Twitter within a couple short months.

An even easier method for discovering tribes to join (that I prefer) is to see what tribes other established Triberr users are in, and try to pitch them as well. For example, if you look at my profile at triberr.com/openworld, you’ll see a full list of the tribes I’ve joined on the right-hand side:

If a tribe chieftain doesn’t promote you, your posts will not appear in the tribal stream where they can be shared. So it’s important to take a quick glance at the members section of each tribe to see if a chief is active. If a chief hasn’t logged into Triberr in the past two years, then it isn’t worth it to join that tribe.

How To Appear Huge

Now let’s rewind back to that brunch in Bangkok, and my “AHA” moment. What I’d realized afterwards was that Taylor had been tracking mentions of his name on social media. And because I had hooked up my blog to Triberr, he was noticing all of these retweets.

And I realized that this was a perfect way to get anyone’s attention (and of course, seem like a Twitter superstar).

When other Triberr users share your content, it essentially includes the title of the post and a shortened link to the article. So you can basically take advantage of this and take some liberty with your blog post titles: you can insert a couple of hashtags, or you can create these “@“ symbols and mention people in the titles of your posts.

Since my breakfast meeting with Taylor, I began to include Twitter handles in the titles of my posts, especially whenever I featured a guest on my podcast.

You can do the same. If you interview or feature someone, you can put their Twitter handle in the post. Once the article is live, they’ll suddenly be pinged dozens of times, and think “Wow, this guy is a big deal.”

In the early days, two-thirds of the guests I’d have on my show had never heard of me or my podcast before I cold e-mailed them and asked for an interview. Yet when they saw dozens and dozens of tweets to their interview on my blog, it sends massive signals of social proof.

Of course, you don’t need to start a podcast to take advantage of this trick. You can quote people in your articles. And if you mention certain people in your post, you could include them in the title too.

For example, you could write a post titled, “11 Important Lessons I’ve Learned from @ SethGodin” or “How @LewisHowes Changed My Life” (these are some simple examples - I’m sure you can come up with more imaginative titles).

But you get the idea. And you can see the potential here. You can get anyone’s attention - in a powerful and significant way - just by including their Twitter handle. If someone sees a blog post with their name in it, being retweeted 40 times, do you think they’ll check it out?

You bet they will!

A Word Of Caution

So, there it is! A clever way to extend your reach and become Twitter famous, and also get anyone’s attention.

The icing on the cake is that Triberr can also significantly boost your website traffic: since I’ve begun using the platform, Twitter has become my third highest traffic referral source, and it’s primarily automated.

By the way, remember the bit I wrote in the introduction chapter? To use these powers wisely? Yeah, that part.

Automation allows us to scale at a minimal cost. Be smart whenever you automate anything. Spam is only spam if you don’t have a good message to share or a worthy cause to promote.

I won’t be dragged into any fruitless debates about ethics; people stake out their position on the issue and they hold to it. Please do not write a bad review simply because you disagree - I simply present strategies in an objective manner and it’s your choice to do what you will with it.

Let us not forget that direct mail - a form of spam - was used for several decades before the internet came along. It is nothing new. But most direct mail advertisements would end up in the trash.

If you try tactics such as this, don’t do it in a heavy-handed way. If you try something like this to get a person’s attention, don’t waste that opportunity. Take your time to write a great piece and be damn sure that whatever you write provide lots of value to that person.

Take some time to find out what that person is to, what projects they’re working on, and in your post, offer your support. Perhaps provide a link to one of their web pages. Generate goodwill, give freely, and it will come back to you in droves.

If you were to use this tactic on me, for instance, but wrote a really thorough and intelligent article stating how my work has helped you and how you put it into effect, and endorsing this book, I wouldn’t hate you for it. It would be a smart way to open the door into a new relationship.

On the flipside, if you used this tactic and tried to “take” something, such as asking me to promote your promote or asking for free, generic advice, it could backfire. These concepts are fundamental and universal.

With that cursory overview, I offer more many more powerful techniques to get people’s attention - in a good way - and to virtually ensure a response in my book “Hack E-mail” (shameless plug), so be sure to check out that book too if this topic interests you!