Regency Writers United

If you’re on Twitter and blog regularly about the Regency Era but wish you had more web traffic, you may be interested in a group I’ve created for Regency Romance Authors and Bloggers on Triberr.com. Triberr is a great way to leverage our collective reach and expand our audience (and twitter followers!). What I love about it is that I don’t have to search as hard for interesting posts to tweet, they come to me!

Set-up is minimal: you only need an invitation, a twitter account and the RSS Feed url for your blog. Don’t panic. I can help with that!

However, Triberr does require a bit of commitment to make it work. I’m currently a member of 3 tribes with about 25 other people and approving posts takes about 5-10 minutes a couple of times a day. I’ve gone from 450 to almost 600 followers on twitter and my blog visits have doubled in the last few months. Yes, I’ve been doing other things, but I credit a large portion of the increases to Triberr.

You don’t need to check as obsessively as I do, but if you only let your feed dump your posts into the tribal stream and rarely or never approve other members’ posts, your voucher to Almack’s (err, spot in the tribe) will be revoked.

If you are already a member of Triberr, send me a DM (@KristenKoster) asking for an inbreeding invite to Regency Writers United group. It costs 30 bones to join. Go to the Regency Writers United tribe page and select TRIBE SETTINGS. Choose your twitter account you want to use and the RSS Feed you want to use for the tribe. Save changes and you should be set.

If you’re not a member of Triberr, the previous paragraph probably made no sense to you. It’s okay! Send me a DM (@KristenKoster) on twitter and request to join the Regency Writers United group and we’ll get you set up in no time.

Once you have your invite, log in to Triberr and create an account. Then, check the basic directions below or just ask for assistance. I got one person set up and running in less than 20 DMs between us.

My hope is that we can make this a mutually beneficial effort and better coordinate our promotional efforts. I also created a Regency Writers United twitter list so you can see the current members and keep up with them.


Once you’ve gotten your invite, log in to the Triberr site and create an account.

The Basics:

1. The first step is making sure you’re hooked up. When you join, you are prompted to put in your twitter account and RSS feed. If you need help finding your RSS feed for your blog, let me know your blog url and we’ll get you set up.

2. Click on the TRIBES tab at the top and select Regency Writers United from the list. You should get a welcome message.

3. You’ll need to set up which twitter account and RSS feed to use for any specific tribes you join. Click on TRIBE SETTINGS & from the pulldown menus, choose your twitter account and your RSS Feed (it can vary by tribe). Save changes & you should be set.

4. Now, when you click on the HOME tab at the top of the page, you should get a blue panel with TRIBAL STREAM, SENT STREAM, MY POSTS and OPTIMIZE.

That’s where you’ll approve posts as they come in. The Thumbs up is “karma” which doesn’t do much yet, but I always click it.

Unless a post title has FREE, WIN, CONTEST, GIVEAWAY or other promotional words, you’ll have a red box that you’ll click to approve posts. Clicking that turns it to a blue check mark and puts the post into your queue.

If you click on the post title, it will take you to that post to review it.

If you click on the little black gear beside the post, you can edit the title to add comments or change it.

The Not-Quite-So-Basics:

If you find a post marked promotional that you want to send through anyway, you have two choices.

A) You can hover over the box labeled “Load Social Buttons” below the post and click on “TWEET”, which will send the post immediately to your twitter stream and remove it from your queue. This is where you will find options to “Like” it on Facebook, give it a “+1” on Google Plus, Discover or Like it on StumbleUpon, or link it on LinkedIn. These other services will ask you to login the first time. These options can also be found with the post on the SENT STREAM.

B) You can edit the title and remove the offending keywords. To find the list of flagged keywords, you can check the default promotional keywords by going to Settings under the gear on the top right of your screen and clicking on CONTENT SETTINGS on the left column.

To check how your posts are doing, go to HOME->MY POSTS and you’ll see your posts listing the number of visits, how many thumbs up (karma) the post received and a quality score (a # that involves sorcery, number of visits and thumb ups, I THINK). Click on the number of visits for a post to see who tweeted it and how many  visits their tweet was responsible for.

You can also see how your fellow tribe members are helping you by going back to the tribe’s main page and clicking on OPTIMIZE. Once there, you need to select your sort order: top traffic-driving or bottom traffic driving tribemates first. In addition to the information for each member show, hovering over their icon will give you a card of information about how they’ve been using triberr in the last 30 days. Clicking on the member’s icon or name will take you to their triberr profile page and tell you a bit about them and lists their tribes.

When viewing a members profile page, you can give them karma on the topic they are currently displaying on their badge. I go through the people on the Recent Shares list and share the love.

You can change your own badge information by clicking on the Grab The Code link or through the Badge Settings option on your own Settings page. Choose topics you talk about frequently to add, and leave the highest scoring one showing, unless you want to boost one of the lower ones. Scores range 0-1000 and are relative to other triberr members.

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