A Bee's Manifesto: How to Make the Very Good F***ing Amazing!

Javier, Juan, and the rest of the Team have done their part. They built this platform that has come to mean a lot to me in a very short time. The job is not done. Not by a long shot.

Now it’s our turn.

beBee announced that they are looking to appoint ambassadors to carry the torch. That’s nice. Here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing.

We are all ambassadors. At least we should be. More on that a little later.

Like many of you, I had doubts about the veracity of view counts. The fact that beBee reports views as approximations strengthens those doubts. 

As a coder, albeit an amateur one, I can see why they chose this route.

As a user, it stirs up questions. For users with no coding skills, it stirs up a lot of questions.

It’s not like we have a lot of history with well-meaning platforms to fall back on.

So I ran my own tests.

I'm not the trusting type. I like to check for myself.

I tried to answer if view counts were valid. In fact, my last 12 beBee posts were that test.

Let me explain.

Views are a function of distribution. Before publishing each post, I decided to which Hives I would post. I added up the membership. From there, I estimated how many Views I should expect. 

Every time someone shared a post to a new hive, I added that membership to the total. and changed the estimate.

The results are clear. View counts always fall within an acceptable margin of error. To my mind, the question is settled. 

I consider view counts to be accurate. 

I would still prefer an actual count over an approximation, but that's just me.

Views are nice.

But, it’s relevants, comments, and shares that ultimately lead to conversions. Views do not directly drive those. Many people have mentioned that engagement rates are far too low in relation to the views. 

I wasn’t so sure about that. Views do drive some engagement but not all that much. That's been proven countless times.

I started looking at follows.

Every new post brought on a flurry of new connections. No surprise there.

Reposts performed less well than original content. Still no surprise.

Here’s a surprise. When I compared follower count to engagement the engagement rate was high. 

The lesson is clear. In hindsight, it’s ridiculously simple. 

Followers engage, Viewers don’t. 

That’s a clear incentive for us to build our follower base.

There’s another thing we need to do first. 

We need more English speakers to join us. I don't mean any disrespect to the international contingent. I just state a fact. The UK and North America need to embrace beBee.

That’s not just Javier’s job. It isn’t Juan’s either.  It’s yours . It’s mine.

It’s everybody’s.

I’m not saying you should wear a sandwich board, or dye your hair orange. You don’t need to tattoo the beBee logo on your forehead (or anywhere else for that matter). 

Just get the word out. Whether you want to call it Baby Steps, Kaizen, or whatever, just do it.

Add a link to your email signature

The link to your profile is on your profile page. Mine is https://www.bebee.com/profile/paul-croubalian. As you can see the format is simple. It's just the domain with /profile and your name. Spaces are replaced with dashes just like in WordPress.

While you're at it, you may as well add the link to your social profiles.

Publish Original Content

Sure, some people here haven’t read your LinkedIn stuff. You may as well just repost. If anything, the current state of things provides much incentive to do just that. That’s shortsighted.

My tests show that original content generates 4X the follows.

It’s those follows that build your engagement. This is not the place to skimp.

I would suggest a mix of one repost to three originals. Too many reposts may alienate the few followers you have.

Promote your beBee posts

Writing a post is only half the battle. Get the word out. It’s like the old pay wall strategy. It’s an old strategy because it works. The more we mention beBee, the more curiosity we generate.

That curiosity brings members.

Those members become followers.

Followers engage.

Harvest LinkedIn

For now, LinkedIn is still the premier business platform. There are about 150,000 regular authors there. Most are fed up of its bizarre antics.

Many of us have significant followings there. Let’s bring the authors and their followings over here. 

Are you worried that you will lose your LinkedIn followers if you stop posting content there? Okay, that’s a legitimate concern. Balancing an existing readership with one that is potentially better is scary. 

I get that.

How about this? Post your new content to beBee first. Three days later, repost to LinkedIn. That should hedge your bets and still help build for the future.

The LinkedIn feed has become Twitter-esque. Post regular updates promoting your original beBee content. Three or four times a day for a week is not too often, I think.

I may not enjoy posting there anymore, but I still use it to promote my posts. Those of you who see the standard ugly LinkedIn updates flow by on your feed, please know that they are automated.

Here’s how to do it automatically.

Go to IFTTT and get this recipe: https://ifttt.com/recipes/411525-auto_update-linkedin

Any Tweet with #in auto-updates your LinkedIn profile.

Here’s how to Update better (This is a Gary Sharpe hack)

Prepare a title image that is 525X425 pixels. Click “Update status” on your LI home page. Paste your post title and the link to it.

An ugly update box will show up. Hit the X in the top right corner to get rid of it. Now, hit the add image icon. It’s the one that looks like a mountain range. Find and select your 525X425 image.

Done.

The more people who know that you are active here, the more curiosity you will build.

Curiosity brings sign-ups.

Most people who try this platform stick with it.

Build with those who are already here

Set time aside to follow people in hives you like. For now, there are no limits to how many you can follow. I don’t know what the future will bring. I know a thing or two about scam artists. beBee will eventually have no choice but to impose limits.

For now, that isn’t an issue. Follow a bunch.

It would be nice to know who isn’t following back.

I, for one, don’t want to engage with someone who has no interest in engaging with me.  A simple “Following Since:” and a date would allow me to give them enough time to follow back if indeed they want to.

If not, no worries, I can stop following them if I want.

Living with Growing Pains

For most of us, beBee is a new thing. We tend to forget that it has over 10 million users. I think we are on the cusp of seeing that number explode. That would be great on one hand and not-so-great on the other.

This is a work in progress. We have the opportunity to help build it. If we all do our jobs as we should, it is conceivable that this platform will cross 100 million users in short order. 

That type of growth will be painful, I guarantee it. 

There will be missteps. There will be mistakes.

I guarantee that too.

I also believe that Javier and Juan want to work with us. They want beBee to be everything we want it to be. And, yes, they want to turn a profit. Why not? They deserve it.

They’ve done their part. They continue to do it.

Now, we need to step up and do ours.

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