A Bee's Manifesto 2, How to Step Up to the Plate

Sorry for the baseball metaphor. I realize this is an international platform, but it fits. “Stepping up to the plate” means you are ready to knock it out of the park to push your team ahead.

Oops, that’s another baseball metaphor. Sue me.

Anybody who’s ever published anything on beBee knows that view-counts are huge. Direct engagement is not as strong. This has nothing to do with the platform. It has to do with us.

How many connections do you have here? I’ve got 307 right now. I’m surprised I get as much engagement on my posts as I do.

Views follow distribution. beBee has that down pat.

Engagement follows, well, following. That’s up to us. beBee does what it can. What it can’t do is replicate the exposure and effort of a million bees. That’s our job. We’re the only ones who can do it.

It’s up to us to be active recruiters. The better we can do that, the faster we will get the most from this fabulous open platform.

Here’s a thought…

Many of us are active on Twitter. This is particularly true of publisher bees. Twitter remains the premier content promotion tool there is.

Let’s use it. Not just to promote our posts, but to promote beBee itself.

This morning, I tweeted “JOIN US on the network that fits ALL sides of YOUR Personality.” I included a link to my beBee profile and this image. (Crap, I just noticed a typo. Tough, it stays)

If you want to retweet it just click here: https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=726788782687662082 . I let the link display as-is to show how easy this can be.

How Twitter can help beBee

I suggest we all put out this type of tweet. Twitter helps a lot by providing a simple way to do it. They call them web intents.

Web intents are just links that interact with Twitter’s servers to do something. You can create intents to tweet or reply to a tweet, re-tweet a tweet, follow a user, or display a user’s profile.

They aren’t tough to create. I’ll even help you. I might even create them for you.

Building a re-tweet intent

A re-tweet intent is the second easiest intent to create. It always starts with https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=.  To get the tweet id is child’s play.

• Tweet what you want to connect to the intent.
• Click on the “…” at the far bottom right of the tweet
• Select “Copy Link To Tweet.” The id is the big number on the end of the link. Easy. 

A “like” intent is exactly the same, except you replace “retweet” with “like.”

Building a follow-me intent

This one is the easiest. It starts with https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name= . Then you just add your screen name.

To follow me you could click on https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=PaulCroubalian

To follow John White it would be https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=juanblanco76

Do you want to follow Javier? Use https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=JavierBeBee

Don’t use the “@.” Don’t put in spaces. Don’t use quotation marks. It’s easy.

Building a Tweet Intent

If we are going to promote beBee, we need to tweet  regularly and often. A retweet intent won’t cut it. You can’t retweet your own tweet. 

We need to build a tweet intent. Once you build this intent, you can keep it saved as a bookmark. Every now and then you can click it.

This one is a little more complicated. There’s more stuff in a tweet. You also need to dance a little to add an image to the tweet.

Here’s the basic format.

It starts off as https://twitter.com/intent/tweet? Then you have to add stuff.

You want to actually tweet something, so it takes a text=. You can HTML escape the text likes this Hello%20World which will show as “Hello World” . If you’re careful to avoid <:, ; “> etc you can just put the text in double quotes like this “Hello World” Both work.

To add an image takes a little more work. That work is well worth it. Tweets with images out-perform by a lot!

Again, Twitter helps. They actually store images for you. You just need to figure out where. Here's how to do that.

• Tweet a post with the image you want.
• Click on the “…” at the far bottom right.
• Select “Embed this Tweet”
• Copy the embed code and paste it into Word. Here’s what my embed code looks like.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">JOIN US on the network that fits ALL sides of YOUR Personality. <a href="https://t.co/WHVDZggOxi">https://t.co/WHVDZggOxi</a> <a href="https://t.co/DDCpMNtW12">pic.twitter.com/DDCpMNtW12</a></p>&mdash; Paul Croubalian (@PaulCroubalian) <a href="https://twitter.com/PaulCroubalian/status/726788782687662082">May 1, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

See that bolded part that starts with pic? That’s where Twitter stores the image. Add that to the tweet text inside the double quotes or with %20 on either end. FYI: %20 means “stick a space here.”

The bolded number is the tweet id. Twitter actually calls tweets "statuses."

If you want to add a hashtag, add “&hashtags=” followed by a list of hashtags without the “#.” Separate them with commas.

So, the link to my “Let’s Push beBee” tweet looks like this:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=”JOIN US on the network that fits ALL sides of YOUR Personality pic.twitter.com/DDCpMNtW12 ”&hashtags=beBee

Or

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=JOIN%20US%20on%20the%20network%20that%20fits%20ALL sides%20of%20 YOUR%20Personality%20pic.twitter.com/DDCpMNtW12%20&hashtags=beBee

Both work.

Pushing the envelope with automation

Grab the image location as described and you can use IFTTT to automate it. Don’t use the “tweet with image” action. Just use the regular tweet one. Add the image location to your tweet text. In this case, the image location would be pic.twitter.com/DDCpMNtW12. Remember to leave spaces before and after it.

You will need two or three IFTTT recipes, one for each time you want the tweet to fire.

But Wait… Here’s an offer You Can't Ignore ! (said in a Vince, the Shamwow guy, voice)

Send me your profile picture and a short blurb like in my tweet and I’ll make you a tweetable image. I’ll also send you back retweet, follow-me, and tweet links.

Hurry, quantities are limited. I can’t do this all day. And other cheesy calls to actions…

Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow me on 

beBee