A portrait artist takes Triberr for a test run

I recently tried a site called Triberr - it's a site where you join a "tribe" of other people and share each other's tweets by retweeting, etc. When the people in the tribe post to their blogs, the site autosends the posts to Twitter. Not just for that user, but to the Twitter feed of every person in the tribe. It did indeed increase hits to my blog (Triberr calls itself "the reach multiplier"). I think for some kinds of businesses it is great. For writers, I see it as an extremely valuable tool.

However, I received messages from some Twitter followers saying that they missed the "personal nature" of my Twitter account as it was before. A couple tweets went out automatically that had some kind of questionable titles and/or content.

Between the kind nudges from the fans and the inappropriate tweets going out, I decided it wasn't for me. Not to be prudish, it wasn't so much the content as much as my feeling of lack of control of things being posted that looked like I was posting them but I wasn't actually creating each action. I really don't feel comfortable in having that control taken out of my hands.

I will say though, that the networking and friendship factor in Triberr is a great thing, and one time when I had a problem, one of the creators of the website (Dino Dogan) emailed me personally and fixed my problem for me. I was very impressed! So Triberr has a lot of great things going for it.

I'm not knocking Triberr, but I do encourage you to really think about it, whether using a tool like Triberr to auto-tweet is going to be helpful for you, or whether it won't be a good "fit" for a portraitist. Personally, I think that portraits are such a personal thing for people to order, it deserves the personal touch.

If you want to learn more about how Triberr works, check out this About Us page of Triberr's blog.

Pre-Scheduling Your Twitter Posts

Scheduled Tweets - Maybe you don't know what this is. It's a Twitter thing, and even if you use Twitter, you may not be aware of it. But there are sites that help a Twitter user (usually a marketing/PR person) to pre-write their Twitter posts and schedule them to run at designated times. If you see certain people on Twitter all the time, you may think at first they have no life. Maybe they don't, but the odds are, they could just have pre-scheduled their Twitter entries.

It seems brilliant at first. What a great idea it is to spend about 20 minutes a day setting up your Twitter posts, then having them post automatically for you at certain intervals you set.

However, a problem that's inherent in these pre-tweets is that they can't take into account stuff going on in the world. The events of the past few weeks have really made me aware of this flaw. For instance, when Osama Bin Laden was killed, everybody on Twitter was discussing it. Automatic Twitter entries that talked about "how to decorate the perfect cupcake" were out of place. I can't remember if the Twitter posts were actually about decorating cupcakes, but there were Twitter entries that were out of place.

Similarly, when a majority of people are on Twitter discussing approximately 200 people missing and unaccounted for after a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri, I again saw the sales and marketing tweets that were badly timed. I realized then that automatic tweets would be something I would never do. You never know what might happen in the world, and your auto-tweets could be terribly inappropriate.

UPDATE: I tried Triberr