WTF Triberr?!? Why I Love and Hate You So Much!
March 11, 2013
About two months ago, I finally joined Triberr. If you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t previously), it’s a community-building platform for bloggers that’s supposed to help increase traffic to your blog and 
your social following in the process.
The basic premise behind Triberr is that you join a topic-based community or “tribe” with fellow bloggers. Once you create a profile for yourself and connect your personal blog to it, your blog posts start appearing in a “tribal stream” like the one below. As you post new content on your blog, it bubbles up into your tribe mates’ tribal stream, where they have the opportunity to review it. If they like it, they can then share it socially with their followers through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all of the other usual suspects, using the convenient, built-in social-sharing tools.
The end result is that your content gets exposed to other bloggers who are interested in the same topics as you are and therefore may be inclined to share your content with their (often substantial) group of followers. In doing so, not only are you getting more people to visit your blog to check out your latest post, you’re theoretically increasing your social following over time as a whole new audience is exposed to your content.
It all sounds so good in theory, but in my experience at least, the platform has its pros and cons. In the interest of full disclosure, let me just say that I’m a Triberr novice. I cannot and do not profess to have spent hours mastering its ins and outs. What you see below is the feedback of a basic user.
The Honest Truth: What I Love About Triberr
First off, it works, well… sort of.
After setting up my account, I joined three tribes and created one of my own called “A Way With Words.” Through those four tribes — all of which focus on content marketing — I have a total of 162 tribe mates, who collectively have a total reach of 1,455,473 people across their networks. That’s pretty impressive and roughly 836 times the reach I have through my own personal Twitter account, where I have a far less impressive (though nevertheless wonderful!) following of just 1,739 people.
And my tribe mates have been viewing and sharing my content. Just one or two people the first couple of times, but that’s steadily grown to a height of about 44 views and 16 shares for my recent post called “Content Targeting: Know Your Target or Never Hit the Mark.”
Ok, it’s not a dramatic number of views or shares, but it’s still pretty good, especially considering that so far for me, Triberr has been a “set it and forget it” type of deal. I’d say for the average two to three minutes I spend on Triberr a week (typically sharing other people’s stuff), it’s a pretty nice return on my investment.
The Honest Truth: What I Hate About Triberr
My biggest gripe is that the user experience is terrible. The site is so bare bones that there’s little to no explanation of how things work or what you’re actually supposed to do. I’ve managed to get some results so far by faking my way through it, but seriously guys, how about making this a bit more user friendly?!?
And it’s not just the lack of explanations. The site seems to face a fair number of technical challenges that speak to the casual nature of the site. The tweets below tell just part of the story and are pretty common:
I’m not complaining – it’s a free site and it’s helping me with my blog. However, I am saying that the platform has some room for improvement, particularly if it’s every going to really take off.
Lastly, my Twitter following has actually remained completely stagnant since joining. Now again, maybe I’m doing something wrong (here again, so instructions on the site would be hugely helpful, folks!), but nonetheless, it doesn’t seem to quite be living up to the hype.