Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The @Triberr effect...Engagement

You may or may not know that I hold a weekly Re-tweet me hop, where in participants are to re-tweet something relevant from each person in the group. This seems innocent enough, to raise your levels of participation, boost your Klout scores thus showing interaction between you and the people following you.

Now, many of our followers are gained through various hops, and giveaway events. This is true, and it is true for a LOT of people on Twitter. #FF (Follow Friday...had to Google it ;-) #TeamFollowBack...the list goes ON and ON. The ways tweeps gain new tweeps seems to go against the genuineness of their following, and I am guilty of this as well.

Enter Triberr.

The widespread phenomenon in the blogging world, that has allowed the little dogs the reach of big dogs. We can be seen by potentially millions. But the question is, what has this done to the Twitter portion of our social media engagement?

Triberr has recently introduced a new feature, called Engagement levels. Direct from a Triberr Bonfire:
Dan Cristokarma +32

We've just released a new feature called "Engagement Levels". Engagement levels tell you what % of your tweets are coming from Triberr. If every single one of your tweets is a Triberr tweet, your engagement level will be 0%. If none of your tweets are from Triberr, your engagement level will be 100%. You can see your stats under your profile picture on the left when you login. 
If your engagement level is at 0%, well that's not good. That means you've got Triberr on "set it and forget it" mode, and you're not really interacting with your Twitter audience. That's bad for your followers and bad for Triberr. If you're at 0% for too long, the system may begin pausing tweets until engagement improves a bit. Try interacting a bit on Twitter and refresh your stats to check your new engagement level


At first when I saw this, I'm not gonna lie, I didn't like it ONE bit. I was afraid that if I wasn't able to get on Twitter as often as my 212 tribes mates were tweeting my posts, that I would be paused, slowed, deleted....something to cause my posts NOT to go out to as wide an audience as I was quickly getting used to.

I started stalking my tweet frequency.

I started stalking my traffic and sources. (Okay, I already did that ;-)

When I hold a hop, I will follow everyone. This evening, when going through the entrants to today's Re-Tweet me Tuesday hop, I began to notice something that changed my mind.

The point of the hop is to re-tweet something relevant from another member. I consider relevant to be something they would want spread farther. Something linking to their blog, or a message they care about. THESE are the tweets that I look for.

How hard would you guess it was to find such a tweet? I have found that most streams are filled with....(DO dots count as drum rolls??) TRIBERR tweets. We have in a sense begun advertising others, and NO LONGER ourselves. The fact that our tweets are going out to many, has filled our streams with virtually NOTHING of ourselves.

This post is just here to remind you, as I was reminded tonight, that it is not just about keeping your percentage above zero. (And if you haven't checked into this yet, ya better) But it is that we opened Twitter accounts for a reason. Don't squander what you have. Don't fill your stream with everyone and their mother...but you. Make sure you are first and foremost in the streams of your followers, and any Triberr tweets are merely icing.

4 comments:

Quirky Homemaker said...

Great post! I've been trying, but it's hard keeping up with everything, isn't it?

Sarah said...

So did you drop Triberr? The stuff you talk about here has been bothering me lately too!

Xenia said...

Great post! I have thought about joining Triberr multiple times but haven't for all the reasons you talked about - would I feel as though I've turned my stream directly into an ad for other people?

Thanks for joining us for Friendly Friday, have a great weekend!

Bob ButterBottom said...

I think Cut Ecakes is either my new cyber crush or just the most useful site / tribemate (other than Maria, she's like the Oracle). You always have good info here. Either way, I'm putting your button up on my blog. I try to only put one or two up at a time.