Too Much of a Good Thing
The day before my Twitter debacle a couple of weeks ago (I was banned for 12 days due to a misunderstanding, but I’m back now), I joined a new Triberr tribe called Power Sharers. For those of you scratching you chins wondering what the heck Triberr is, it’s a new website that allows bloggers to come together with like minded bloggers and use social media to amplify their presence. Huh? Okay, let me try again.
Let’s say I write a blog post (like this one!). It’s then loaded into the tribes I’m a member of on Triberr. A tribe is nothing more than a group of people that are (hopefully) like minded and willing to share each others posts. So I’ve written this blog article and it’s loaded into the available queues for everyone on Triberr that is a tribemate of mine. Each of them then has the opportunity to decide which social media networks they’re members of that they want to share the blog on (if any). In my experience the most used social media stream is Twitter.
There’s more than just sharing others blog posts though, it also provides a handy and useful tool for me to find other blogs worth reading. It shows me the title, author, and a snippet of the blog article. If I like it, I can read the entire thing. So in this way I’m not (personally) just blindly sharing content, I’m making sure it’s interesting first. Interesting to me, at least.
Now back to my Triberr experience. I was in a few groups that were focused on writing and writers, primarily. Then I got the invite to join Power Sharers. It seemed look a good opportunity to expand my reach so I jumped on it. Now I’m wondering if I jumped in over my head! Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of potential with this group, but there are also several serious bloggers in here. Serious as in multiple posts a day. That means when I log into Triberr to check out my stream of available posts to share, It’s not an easy task anymore! What used to be 5 – 10 minutes is now 20 – 30, and that’s if I do it twice a day!
Furthermore I feel kind of bad. The vast majority of posts I do not share. It’s not that they don’t have value, in most cases, it’s that they aren’t things that would be of benefit to me or to the presence I’ve established via my social presence. I don’t write or tweet about how to make money blogging, for example, nor do I focus on sharing how to properly engage and motivate employees. Good topics worthy of reading up on, but they’re not my niche. My followers share similar interests with me, and while there may be a few that like to see those blogs, the majority do not. I’m more concerned about spamming out unwanted information and losing people (or getting banned again, though I have no reason to believe I would be). And so I carefully wade through the list of would-be blog posts and trim each daily list of a hundred or so down to three to five.
Ultimately I’m here to help my followers by giving them something I think is valuable and to help myself by reading these blogs and expanding my own reach. I’m happy to do some quid pro quo where it’s appropriate with another blogger, but I also understand if what I blog about has nothing to do with their social presence. Bummer for me, perhaps, but it’s a two way street and I’m okay with it. Exposing myself (legally and in a non-age restricted fashion) is not as important as keeping the faith of the people I’ve already got. My readers and followers come first, but having said that if I’m making any presumptions on their benefit I can just as easily stop – all I need is a friendly bit of feedback.
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