Why Some Triberr Posts Are Not Shared

I joined Triberr in the early days in which you automagically shared the posts of everyone in your tribe. Two years later the automatic sharing has come and gone and a million different changes have taken place both within Triberr and the blogosphere.

These days your basic membership in a tribe no longer means that you automatically share every post your fellow tribesmen publish and that is ok. Things changed because as tribes grew we found that the membership didn’t always consist of people who had the same goals, thoughts and ideas as our own.

In concept that wasn’t and isn’t a bad thing but in execution it created some issues.

The more prolific bloggers flooded the feeds of their tribesmen with a million posts and sometimes those posts had nothing to do with the topics that the bloggers normally covered. Concern grew about whether this would have a negative impact upon the response rate to links that were tweeted and if it would dilute the brands of the bloggers.

Present Day Tribe Etiquette

And now in what feels like a thousand years later we arrive at our present situation where tribesmen don’t sign up for tribes with the knowledge they will tweet out every post. Sure in an ideal situation they will join tribes in which they are in sync with the other bloggers and feel comfortable/confident promoting the posts that go out.

But in reality I am not sure how often that happens.

People still get pay attention to who promotes their stuff and who doesn’t, they take notice of whether they think an equitable amount is being shared and they often respond/react based solely upon their understanding of what is fair and not necessarily upon whether the content is good.

For the moment let’s ignore the problem of promoting without reading  and focus on two things that can kill your chances of getting your post shared.

These Are My “Rules”

Just to be clear, these are my rules of thumb for Triberr operations.

Press releases– I don’t just send out press releases. Sometimes I see them show up in my feed and I just shake my head. But there are press releases that make me want to bang my head against the wall.

Those are the ones that read something like “Joshua Wilner is the smartest man to ever walk the planet. He is a social media expert, Noble Prize winner and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Sir Joshua Once shot an elephant while wearing his pajamas, but how he got into his pajamas he’ll never know.

Giveaways/Reviews– I don’t automatically ignore giveaways/reviews but am cautious about which ones I help to promote. If it looks interesting to me there is a good chance I’ll give it a whirl but I should add I am not a fan of blogs that never offer original content.

If you have a blog that is nothing but reviews and giveaways there is a good chance I will ignore it. Call me a snob but I prefer blogs that offer original content. It is not easy to produce this stuff on a regular basis and I am not a fan of of people who game the system for traffic.

That might not be reasonable, logical or rational to you but I am ok with that. These are my rules, you can make your own.

One More Thing

I don’t believe there is a single path to social media success. I think there are multiple ways to reach the promised land and that most of them are contingent upon how well you engage and interact with others.

You can come up with any number of examples, you can be Dorothy looking for a Scarecrow to help avoid the flying monkeys or be Frodo searching for a fellowship to get you through Middle Earth and into Mordor.

It doesn’t matter who you are but it does matter that you do it with others because engagement is the secret sauce.

And now as Mr. Gump would say, “that is all I have to about that.”