What I Tell People About BeBee

Social media is a zoo at the best of times. Figuring out where you are going to get the most value for the time you spend there is a constant work in progress.
Every site has its pluses and minuses, and it doesn’t really take very long to figure them out.
It all depends on what you are looking for.
As of about two years ago I was spending time on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in that order of preference. As of a year ago it was LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
As of today it’s BeBee, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as a distant fourth.

Two Questions

So two questions arise. 1. What happened to LinkedIn? and 2. How did BeBee get so popular with me?
I won’t belabour the first point, other than to say that LinkedIn was great for the first year and for the second year not so much. This had a lot to do with changes in their algorithm that made it all but impossible for any of the 1800 or so followers I had there to be notified when I had written a new post.
And you know how that goes…if there ain’t no audience, there just ain’t no show.The second question is one I am happy to answer with enthusiasm. A renewed enthusiasm, I might add, because there was a period before I joined beBee when I wasn’t too thrilled about social media in general and was seriously considering to just going back to my WordPress site and building a following through Twitter and leaving it at that.
But beBee changed all that and for the better.

What I Was Looking For That I Found At beBee

As a blogger, I was simply looking for an audience and some interaction from that audience. I mean, that’s really all most op/ed bloggers are looking for anyway.
Very quickly on beBee, I started to acquire page views well in excess of just about anything I had been able to achieve on LinkedIn. And I thought, hmmmm, there appears to be a lot of interested people here.

And in a relatively short period of time I was fielding comments, and growing my network, because I connected with everyone who made an intelligent comment.
On the other side of the coin, I was noticing that the quality of content on beBee was generally quite high. Some of it was from the people I had been connected to on LinkedIn. But a lot of it was from new people who had interesting things to say.

Buzzing Around

As I started to explore the hives on beBee, I realized that there were a lot of areas, both business and social, that I was interested in, and that I didn’t just have to scroll around my home page to find good stuff.
I could go into these affinity-based hives and find great posts that related directly to the things I was interested in.
And this is really how you go about deciding where to place your own posts and how to build your profile within beBee.

A Hive Of My Own

One of the other cool things I found out was that anybody could create a hive and invite people to join it.
So on the 4th of July, during a great 3-D lunch with Phil Friedman, Don Kerr and Kevin Pashuk, we decided to form the Beezers hive, which would be a collection of the op/ed posts that resonated with us personally.
Since we were all professional communications people, we figured that the standards could be kept very high, and so far so good.

The Pollinating Spirit Of Bees

BeBee is now the site where I spend the vast majority of my time. And there are a few very good reasons for this.
There is a positive spirit here. 

I think a lot of people look at beBee as an alternative to conventional social media platforms. There’s very little of the typical social media bitchiness here. What there is is a lot of positive spirit and genuinely constructive criticism in the conversation streams.
There is permission to be yourself. 

Personally I have never has a problem with that, but then I’ve been writing for longer than most of you out there have been breathing.
 But a number of people I know have told me that the exhilaration they feel at being able to express themselves authentically without fear of someone jumping down their throat for it has made a huge difference in their posting and their attitude toward social media in general.
BeBee has an inviting look and feel. 

Maybe it’s the old adage familiarity (LI & FB) breeds contempt. Or maybe it’s just plain true that great design makes a web site more appealing. In either case I find myself simply enjoying the experience of being here.
You really feel you are part of a larger world here. 

I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of connections outside of North America on LinkedIn and definitely not on Facebook. But here on beBee I now know people from all over the place. That international flavour really adds to the learning experience that, for most of us, is part of the reason we’re here in the first place.
I could probably come up with a lot more stuff to tell people about beBee. But I'm nothing if not smart enough to get when I have made my point.

A Parting Shot

beBee is not ever going to be all things to all people. But then again neither is anything else out there.
If you are really into the learning, the insight sharing and the personal brand building on social media, you really need to have a few go-to places.
For me, beBee is one of the most important of them. That may not be the case for you. But the only way you’re going to know that for sure is to join beBee and take it for a spin.
It might not turn out to be your numero uno, but then again, it just might.

If you consider this post to have value, please share it with your network or repost it in whatever hives you think with benefit most from it.

If you want to read more of my posts, you can do that here:
https://www.bebee.com/publisher/@jim-murray
Download my free ebook, Small Business Communications For The Real World, here:
https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/
All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:
https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page

All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray.