beBee Ready to Swarm North America with Affinity Social Networking

Have you caught the buzz about beBee, the new and fast-growing platform for affinity social networking?

The one-year old startup out of Madrid, Spain, is gaining traction and aspires to ultimately compete against LinkedIn and other social media monoliths. How? By offering a fresh approach to a somewhat staid social networking landscape. beBee defines itself as:

• “The social network where your personal and professional lives come together.”
• “Connect with users that share your interests around the world, find content that is truly relevant to you and thousands of opportunities…”
• “Because being a person and a professional don’t have to be independent!”

beBee currently has more than 10 million users in over 100 countries -- mainly in Spain, South America and India. The affinity social network plans to swarm North America with projections to quickly attract over 100,000 new users as part of a larger outreach initiative targeting the United States and Canada -- in addition to Australia and the United Kingdom.

“beBee's main market will be the United States,” says Javier Cámara Rica,  co-founder and CEO of beBee

"beBee continues to grow all around the world and has increased its presence in countries like Spain, Mexico, Brazil and The United States in the first year as a social network," says the CEO. "It is precisely in the United States where beBee is going to make the biggest efforts in 2016-2017 and where it expects to repeat the results that it already had in the countries where it has an important presence."

"Our goal for 2016-2017 is to continue engaging with users in the countries in which we already have a successful presence and to make a strong breakthrough in the United States, UK, Canada and Australia." 

Conversations to raise more venture capital are ongoing, he told me during an exclusive interview. "To boost its worldwide expansion, beBee is currently in negotiations with investment groups to reach an investment round," he says. 

Aiming Stinger at LinkedIn

When it comes to competing against mega social media sites, beBee’s CEO is bullish. In fact, beBee appears to be aiming its stinger directly at LinkedIn, the biggest professional networking site for business.

“We are gaining 35,000 new users per day,” Mr. Cámara Rica points out. He also makes a bold prediction:

“With this kind of growth we hope to be bigger than LinkedIn within a few years.”
Javier Cámara Rica

LinkedIn’s current user base is reportedly over 400 million. Therefore, beBee will need a lot of worker bees to build a colossal hive which could swarm the biggest professional business social network in the world.

“There’s a lot of noise, poor relevance and poor affinity on LinkedIn,” notes Mr. Cámara Rica. “And you can't really enjoy your hobbies and leisurely interests on LinkedIn. But beBee affinity networking allows you to connect with people who share the same interests as you do beyond strictly business.”

Moreover, he points out that beBee boasts double the number of active users compared to his much larger would-be rival:

“bebee is totally open and based on user opinions,” says Mr. Cámara Rica. “Our engagement metrics are amazing and promising."

"We have a high rate of 50% monthly active users, whereas LinkedIn has 25%."
Javier Cámara Rica

"And let’s bear in mind that we still haven’t maximized our content development,” he adds.

beBee just celebrated its first birthday in February following a satisfying and successful year.

• Also Read: What is beBee and How Does it Work?

When asked how blogging for beBee will differ from LinkedIn, Mr. Cámara Rica says, “Our platform will be similar to Medium but fully integrated into beBee. That means your stories will be published automatically through the affinity hives.”

beBee “hives” are similar to LinkedIn groups, albeit with a much broader variation that extends well beyond professional interests only. There are currently more than 21,000 hives on beBee after one year.

Moreover, the number of hives is expected to grow exponentially as more and more users are projected to join beBee worldwide. Creating a hive is relatively easy and any user can do it.

Commenting on the main difference between beBee hives and LinkedIn groups, Mr. Cámara Rica says, “Hives are open. You can join a hive without waiting to be accepted by the moderators. Also you have both hobby based hives – such as music and fashion – as well as strictly business professional hives.”

Open Engagement

One of Mr. Cámara Rica’s motivations in building beBee stemmed from what he saw as too many unhappy users on LinkedIn, including himself, due to major restrictions recently imposed on LinkedIn Notifications, Groups and Messenger.

“Every user that follows you on beBee will get an instant message whenever a new blog post is published,” he promises. “Bloggers will also be able to reach a broad audience through our newsletter.”

For those unaware, LinkedIn used to notify a user’s entire network when a blog post was published. However, the decision was recently made by LinkedIn to curtail that practice, in addition to changing the rules on Groups – which caused a backlash by many open group moderators.

Jobs & Recruiters

Similar to LinkedIn, beBee also features job openings in a broad array of fields and industries. In fact, users can elect to receive such notifications via email. Yet, unlike LinkedIn, Mr. Cámara Rica emphasizes,

“We will never charge users and companies for purposes of jobs and recruitment."
Javier Cámara Rica

"Rather, it will be free," he adds. "Our business model is similar to Facebook targeted ads. So we will grow very fast because companies don’t have to pay to recruit.”

Moreover, he notes, “Hives provide direct access to a job section and we are also going to list classified ads for products including cars, houses, second hand articles, trading, services, etc.”

In other words, beBee is casting a wide net featuring a cross-section of  job openings, not just those for white collar corporate positions (although they will be included as well).

Looking Forward

With a hopeful eye toward the future, Mr. Cámara Rica predicts:

“We are sure beBee is going to be bigger than Twitter and LinkedIn."

I asked him how the startup decided on a name in the first place, and what of its relevance?

“Bees are very important for humans,” Mr. Cámara Rica explains. “Bees are hard workers. They build their hives -- communities -- and they make a lot of buzzing. In short, bees know about teamwork!”

John B. White is a beBee Brand Ambassador and CMO of the company, Social Marketing Solutions. He has been an early proponent of the new affinity social network and shares these insights:

"beBee is a great all-in-one site,” he says. “It's a bit of a hybrid, which is one of the advantages because you find almost everything on beBee. You don't have to log in and out of four or five different sites to get the experience you can have on beBee, all in just one site."

He continues: “It's also not as stuffy as LinkedIn. Therefore, you won't get the ‘LinkedIn Police’ called on you when posting something non-business related. Yet, beBee is more professional than Facebook, as there are many audiences to share business-related content and engage in fruitful discussions.”

• Read John’s January 2016 interview with the beBee CEO.

Final Thoughts

While still in its infancy, beBee has several big advantages for users compared to some of its competitors, such as:

• A single social platform combining the personal and the professional.
• Hives (groups) are more broad and varied than other social networks.
• No micromanagement or restrictions imposed on hive/group activity or general user engagement across the platform.
• Fewer spammers pitching their latest service, book or product.
• A more open and less regimented feel in platform navigation and functionality.

beBee can likely buttress user growth by appealing to the large Hispanic/Latino demographic – including Millennials -- which is the fastest growing population in the USA.

Thus far, many users (or "bees") liken beBee to a breath of fresh air in an otherwise crowded and boisterous social media space. Therefore, those looking for a more diverse social networking experience that is new and exciting might find beBee analogous to the sweet taste of honey.

My advice: examine beBee and discover what all the buzz is about.

DBG

NOTE: This post first appeared on LinkedIn Pulse (March 20, 2016)

* All images courtesy of beBee.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I'm an independent writer and strategic communications executive with over 20 years of experience in the public and private sectors -- including work in the White House, Congress, national news media and elsewhere. Join me on Twitter, Medium, beBee and connect on LinkedIn. Other blog posts I've written for LinkedIn Pulse since 2014 are available here. I'm also a contributor to PR Daily, Social Media Today and GovLoop.

NOTE: All views and opinions are those of the author only and not official statements or endorsements of any public sector employer, private sector employer, organization or political entity.