Bees Swarm. Bad News for My Kid, Not Great for LinkedIn Either

I haven't decided which yet.

LinkedIn could learn a thing or two about this. (tweet this)

Let me explain.

Peter will be 28 on July 18th. He works at Pratt and Whitney and loves it. That job is what allowed him to buy his first house.

Peter invited the whole herd/family for a BBQ. It was to be his first family hosting thing. 

Pete never leaves things to chance. 

He organized. He prepared. He adjusted. He re-adjusted. He had everything covered. Everything was going as planned. Things were rolling along perfectly.

Sound familiar, LinkedIn?

Bees swarm. 

Bees don't care about your plans.

There's a nearby bee farm ("Apiary" for you vocabulary sticklers. I looked it up.) A queen got loose. She thought Pete's brand-new fence would make a great brand-new hive.

Peter disagreed.

At this point, many of us would have called an exterminator. There's one thing I love about the next generation.  They don't give in to knee-jerk reactions. 

Bitch and moan all you want about "bubble-headed Millennials." They aren't half as stupid as they want us to believe.

I often find them inspirational. This is one of those times.

Peter did not call an exterminator. He called the beekeeper. A phone call and MMS message later, they figured out a queen escaped the apiary. The beekeeper promised to come get her that very evening. It must be done after dusk when the bees have all returned to the swarm.

Then I got to thinking about LinkedIn vs. Bees

It's no surprise that LinkedIn has been messing with our reach. We think we have access to 400 million + potential readers. No, we have access to about 5% of our connections. Worse, it's always the same connections. 

Anything that doesn't grow dies. (tweet_this)

LinkedIn views are dropping faster than a pulled-pork sandwich on Ramadan. (tweet this, if you dare)

LinkedIn engagement is negligible. 

I started writing on LinkedIn (June 7, 2015) to show proof of skill-set. Ghostwriters can't point to published works. Technically, we don't have any.

LinkedIn gave me a platform to change that. It worked. It worked very well. (tweet this)

I often wonder what would have happened if I started today. Chances are I would abandon the idea after 5 or 6 posts. I sure as hell would not have stuck around to write 89 of them!

This post will be my last on LinkedIn.

I'm not angry with LinkedIn. It just slipped from being my primary platform to an also-ran. It's no longer a force. It's just not very relevant to me anymore. 

Besides, now I have a better choice. I'm still writing often. Now, I write on beBee. They don't limit my reach. They actually help it, and not just because I'm a VIP bee. 

The Hive system provides distribution to everybody. Giggle about the corny bee references if you like. We don't mind. Bees are very social. The important thing is that you keep the organic reach you build.

Test after test proved it. Writer after writer proved it. beBee is better (tweet this)

If you write on LinkedIn, write on beBee. Just copy/paste your posts. I only did that for about three weeks. Then, my beBee following was strong enough to eclipse LinkedIn's engagement.

Start now. It doesn't take much more work. You'll be laughing by next month.

Parting Lessons for LinkedIn

Take a hint from my son's dilemma. Take another from his solution.

Bees swarm. A single queen brings hundreds of thousands of followers.

Pulse has some 600,000 articles published every month. All but a relative handful are from Average-Joes. Those are the ones your Vaunted Algorithm hurt most. 

Without them, you are just a CV storage site and not a very good one at that.

You went to great lengths to tell everyone when you hit the 1,000,000 publishers mark. I assume that number is for anyone who has ever published anything on Pulse. Active writers publish at least once a week. That means there are no more than 150,000 publishers on LinkedIn, if that. 

They provide the reason people visit you more often.

They're the ones you're mistreating.

I understand that you think you can replace them with the news giants. Here's a scoop for you. We already follow the giants on their sites. Why do we need to come to yours to read them?

We writers were in an abusive relationship. We stuck around because we had little choice. We took your beatings. We took your bitch-slaps. We had little choice. 

We bitched. We complained to deaf ears. We still stuck around. We had little choice.

Now, we do. 

Bees swarm.

Already, many active LinkedIn writers have made the switch to beBee. Their readers are following. 

Bees swarm.

Not a day goes by that I don't see a post about someone nuking their LinkedIn account. That often triggers more account nukings. 

Bees swarm.

Many blame LinkedIn senior management. I do not. I was a senior manager. I know we can only act on the information we have. We get that information from middle-managers. They're the ones I blame. They paint a rosy picture for you. 

It's easier and safer than admitting the truth. 

Bees swarm.

I will not be nuking my LinkedIn account. I find it of some limited value. I pop over two or three times a week to check on connections who have not yet made the jump.

The middle managers will point to those visits and say, "See, here is an Active User! He's here twelve freaking times a month!!!" 

Big whup.

Then they will pat themselves on the back. They will high-five in the halls. They will dance happy-dances.

They think they pulled the wool over your eyes. Maybe they're right. Or, maybe, they are just delusional. Either way, it isn't good for you.

Bees swarm.

LinkedIn, beBee does not need to take your "433 million" users. You know why 433 million is in quotation marks. So does everyone else. 

LinkedIn has the lowest daily-use rate of any major platform. (tweet this) I would be surprised if LinkedIn had much more than 10-20 million daily users. They only have about 30 million monthly ones.

That's still significant. But, Bees swarm. Act while you still can, LinkedIn.

Then again, it's no longer your problem. It's Microsoft's.

So, Satya, wake up and smell the honey. You have 26.3 billion reasons to stop the migration before it becomes an exodus.

It may already be too late. 

It probably is.

Bees Swarm.

Look me up when you get to beBee. Once there, check out the beBee Cheat Sheet hive. It's full of tips and tricks to get you started. My beBee posts are here.