More Leads, Less Effort.
Ovi Negrean is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Bee of SocialBee.
SocialBee is committed to building the best social media management product and marketing services on the market. Social media marketing as it should Bee.
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0:00
Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, where I'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go.
Right. With us right now we've got Ovi Negrean, and Ovi, you are the Co-Founder and CEO of SocialBee, and full disclosure we use SocialBee and we love it. So I'm a little bit of a fan. So I might not ask you the hardball questions here. Because I really love what you guys have built. So first off, Ovi, thank you for joining us.
0:58
Thank you for having me, and nobody's above the hard ball questions. We we're quite open here.
1:02
Yeah. Okay, good. Alright, so first off, we should say that SocialBee is a social media management platform. And so for someone who doesn't even know what that is, can you kind of just explain what that what that means?
1:16
Yeah, sure. So for any small business or entrepreneur or solopreneur, they usually nowadays have their LinkedIn profiles. There may be a LinkedIn company page, Facebook page, Facebook profile, Instagram profile, maybe a Google My Business profile, maybe a Pinterest profile, and so on. So as you're producing content, and as you want to be out there to to show your knowledge to the world, you want to share across all of your profiles. And then you can do that by just going directly to Facebook, to Twitter, to LinkedIn, and so on and sharing it there. Or you can use a tool like social be where basically you add all of your content in one central place. You set up posting schedules, with categories in mind, so you have a good context mix. Of course, your social profiles, and then we take care of the rest. Plus, we have all sorts of automation and all sorts of bells and whistles that we can help you with. So we can actually save you quite a lot of time and hope you get better results, because you will be able to be more active on your social profiles so that more people can find out about what you're doing.
2:18
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, at some point, when someone starts their business, you know, I generally recommend that they try not to be if they're the very, very, very early stage, like they're just, you know, ideation. They're just kind of, you know, getting their brand out there for the very first time, I generally recommend Don't, don't try to be on all the social media platforms like pick one, and just build your audience there. And then you know, maybe when you've got, you know, you can hire someone part time to help you out, then maybe go to number two, but I think once you get past number two, Ovi, it's, I mean, even number one and number two, I mean, there's just so many advantages to using up platform like SocialBee. And the good news is SocialBee is it starts at 19 bucks a month. The pricing is really great. If you look at the kind of the matrix, you've got some different levels, bootstrap, accelerate and Pro. I really like SocialBee because it does start at such an economical level. At and can you kind of talk about what exactly you get for $19 a month?
3:26
Yeah, sure. So indeed, we are also a startup and we are mindful of having expenses pile up as a business owner. So we wanted to give a relatively inexpensive entry version. So at the $19 per month bootstrap option with that one, you can basically connect up to five social profiles. So this can mean that you have your LinkedIn personal profile and your LinkedIn page. This would be to maybe the Twitter would be three, one Facebook page, this would be for and maybe an Instagram account. So this would get you up to five profiles. To be honest, that's by far the main limitation that this this plan has. The other limitations just come into play when you are a bit more advanced where you need to have more content categories or if you want to also invite some other people to to so that you can collaborate together if you have if you want to have multiple workspaces So for example, if you're running multiple businesses and want to manage them in one place, but still keep them relatively separate, then you would be able to go on the pro plan and then have different workspaces and maybe even invite different people to to help you for the different businesses. But as I said, the main differentiator is the number of connected accounts
4:39
Yeah, right right. And you know again, for baby brand new Freelancer type things I you know, your bootstrap levels probably going to be just fine getting used the platform, you got a 14 day free trial. And again, that's it social be so it's b e.io. And then you can learn all about it. So I'm a fan. Of course you've got a money Back Guarantee on it as well to kind of just goof around play with the platform. Now, what I want to talk about is kind of this, again, this natural progression of what business owners can expect in terms of managing their social media. Now the idea of using a management platform is that it's going to save you a lot of time. If you are doing social media, where you're like, Ah, it's Thursday afternoon, I should probably put something on Twitter. It's like Wednesday morning, I should definitely be posting some stuff on LinkedIn. Okay, here I go. And then you go and you redo these posts on all these different platforms over this stuff just takes time. And so when you have a management platform, the idea is you set it up once you load it up with your content, and then you specify, you know where it goes when it goes there and we'll talk about how that works. But you know, the ideas that it would you know, get you know, I like that you have some average time saved, you know, you could save easily Eight hours or more. I mean, I could see where you can save a lot more time, if you're sharing a lot of content with a $19 a month membership.
6:09
Yeah, indeed. So basically, I think the the time saver is the main thing that we're doing. Because, as you said, if you if you don't have a clear structure, and you don't have a clear plan in place, you just remember from time to time that Oh, I didn't post anything on my Social Forum for one week, or maybe even more, which is quite dangerous, because people might check out your website, then they might go to your social profiles, they might see you didn't post anything in one month, and they could probably think that you went out of business. So that's why it's also important to stay up to date and to have fresh post across your your platforms. But then the nice part with social media is that because it's a category based posting system, which also does content recycling, you can spend, let's say one hour, maybe even a month, when you load up your content, and then it just set it and forget it. And this going to allow you to actually focus on the many, many other things that you have to do in your business while knowing that the social media part is taken care of,
7:08
and and Ovi, how would you describe social be compared to maybe Meet Edgar, Bob for other social media management platforms that might exist?
7:21
So I'm going to start with the meter comparison because actually, it's the closest competitor that we have when it comes to two types of features. And it's because they are also a category based hosting system that also does content recycling. And if I'm not mistaken, I think they may might have been the among the first who actually invented this category based posting system. The problem and we did use meters during the past before starting social media and some other businesses. But the problem that we saw was that even though they created this industry, almost the category based pricing system, they stopped innovating. They didn't bring new things. They didn't freshen up their their UI or add new functionality. And then they were also quite expensive, where their entry price was way bigger than ours. Yeah, we knew that before smartlink. Yeah, it's basically you need to pay at least 50 bucks to be on the plan. And especially as a freelancer or entrepreneur, where you have maybe three, four or five profiles. Social media will do everything which that mitaka does. And then we have some more features because as I said, we do always try to innovate and to come up with with new things. So then basically, you get the same and more at a lower price, which we we think it's a very good value add for for our customers. And then if we're thinking of some other tools like Hootsuite or buffer, basically, the main difference is that both of these are Cubase posting system. So what this means is that you have your queue, you keep adding things to your queue, but then when You don't have anything left in your queue, nothing goes out. Well, in social media because we have evergreen posting, this means that we pick the items from a category one by one until we get to the last one. And then we just jump to the first one again, right? So you shouldn't do this for all type of content that you have. But for the Evergreen blog posts, which maybe you spend a lot of time crafting, you should definitely share them more more often. And the other part is the category based part. Yeah, and then the other part is the category based part where in in Hootsuite or buffer if you want to mix in your promotional posts with your blog post with third party curated content, maybe with some means or some funny content, you have to always rearrange things yourself. So they come in a nice way and not have 10 promotional posts in a row just because you are in the mindset of creating promotional posts, in social, you add them to the right categories, and then you just say okay, on Monday at 2pm I want to post one of my blog post on Tuesday at 11am. I want to post a curated content And so on, and then the platform takes care of the of the rest. Yeah.
10:04
So and I'd like to kind of, kind of pull back the curtain and share exactly what we did. So we love the category based way of scheduling, because it allows us to kind of put all of our content into buckets. And then once you have that bucket, now you have also a calendar feature within social be where you say, Hey, listen, every Wednesday at 1pm, I want you to share something from whatever's next in the queue needs to be shared on these specific platforms. And so there's a little bit like, you know, it's probably you're going to take a little bit of time to get it set, right. And I think a lot of times, you know, you just kind of look at an empty calendar and shrug your shoulders and go, I don't know it. So you know, what we the our first thing that we did is we talked we, as a team were like, well, what is all the different types of country content that we share. Okay, so then that becomes our categories. And so for us, we have category one is promote our own content. And so that would be blog posts, videos, podcasts, and we're creating, you know, we're we're promoting more content that we've created. We use social media, we don't really use it to sell a whole lot. We use it to build a relationship with our audience. So we're promoting, you know, giving valuable content on social media. Number two, category two would be where we're bragging about our clients media successes. And so those ones aren't evergreen because those ones we want to brag about them once on each because we get so many breaks for our clients. You know, we don't want to we there's no need to repeat them. So every all of our clients get bragged once for every media placement, every good media placement, they get so so we've got like, we've got about 31 pieces of content or promote our content. That's an evergreen brags. We have three that are in the queue. So we're getting a little backlog here. We got it, we had a great week, we were having too much success with our guys. And then number three as our inspirational quotes, again, this is another evergreen category. So this stuff is just, it's, you know, once it gets to the end, you know, we just keep putting stuff at the front of the queue. And so every day, I think, or three times a week now, we also use Trello. To actually explain to my social media person, every Monday, your job is to find three inspirational quote, designed three inspirational quotes and put it into this category Wednesday, and it's so she's constantly filling this up so that this stuff doesn't repeat because we don't want it to repeat too often. But if it had to, it could, and then finally we share. We will share podcast, our podcasts, mp3 posts, it's all its own category. And that only goes on Twitter because each and every This is the tricky thing. Every platform has their preferences in terms of hashtags, can you share a video? Can you share still images it's every one of them has their own rules. And so if you don't be if you're not a little thoughtful on how you're doing this, it's going to be a mess. And so that's why one thing that you guys do at social media and I think is wonderful as well is you actually have concierge services and as I just went through all this stuff, there's probably some people that are listening to me explain this and go oh my i wouldn't even know how to figure that out. And that's what a concierge could do. Right? Can you know you guys offer this and and i don't see this a lot with with other providers. A lot of times you just got to go on up work and find your own person. But what I like about your SocialBee concierge, like you know how to max out the platform.
13:52
Yeah, indeed. So we realized that some people have the time and skill set to to use our tool. While other people just want the end result, they just want those social media posts on their their platforms, they might not even know how to craft a good post, they probably most likely don't have time to do that themselves. And some of people, some other people don't want to hire a virtual assistant or somebody to help them with that. Because especially with virtual assistants, you hire them, you train them, they might do a great job, but then eventually they leave and then you have to start that cycle again. Yeah, so we decided we will do that part for for for them. So we have a few concierge services. And the social media specialist is the most popular one, where we will actually create one social media post for you on a daily basis. It's going to be tailored to your needs to the social profiles, it needs to go on. And then we, your own designated social media be as we call it, our colleagues who are delivering the service will take care of that. And then we take care of finding these people, training them both making sure that that quality is good. If they go on a holiday, it's not your problem, we have a colleague who can jump in and replace them. And because we managed to also streamline this whole process, we can also offer this at a very affordable price, probably most of times much lower than, than the one you could buy by going on fiber or by finding of Yeah, Oh,
15:20
for sure. I mean, I'll spill the beans here. If you don't mind. I know the price. It can always change. But currently as it when we're recording this, a post, every one post today is 129 per month, flat feet. Two posts a day is 249 per month. And honestly, if you can spend to 49 a month and get, you know, just great content going into the queue. That's a great way to do that. And so you also have some other services. Are there any other services that folks should know about? On concierge?
15:54
Yes. So we have, we have basically a few set of services and we are releasing Your services every quarter or so lately, and we will try to release them even more often. So some of the services are centered around growth. So growing your audience on Instagram, growing your LinkedIn connections, growing your, your Twitter followers, and so on. And then we also have a service around creating articles for your blog posts for your websites. So basically blog post, where we will write articles which are at about 1000 words, we can do that weekly or monthly based on the plan that you're on. and here also, the prices are quite affordable. And then we are now in the process of productizing. The the paid part of things so as you know, social media, especially nowadays, and more and more so i think so is it's not only the organic part where you're posting on your social profiles, but also investing into ads. And if you do that strategically, and with somebody that knows what they're doing, you can get a very good return on Last month, both on bait social but also on on the search, which is mostly Google nowadays. Now
17:07
you also do a onboarding migration, which, like, I'm going to tell you moving platforms. I that's one thing I just, I always do, I'll just pay the money because I you learning a brand new platform and getting everything set, right. It's it's it just it generally takes a little bit of time. And that's just the reality no matter what platform you're moving from. And I think particularly where you already have things set up, like what we were doing before SocialBee, Ovi, we were using like four different platforms. And so for us, I really wish we would have done on porting it now. Now that it's set up it's a wonderful because we have one tool to rule them all. I've got one person that's pretty much running everything and you know, I've got my gun. One person on management who kind of oversees and just kind of verifies everything before it goes live. It's a great system. It's great software. And I want to thank you for, for, for putting it together because it's a, you know, we we love the you know, again once you get over the, you know, kind of setting it up, man, it just does its thing. And, and I love having I love having simple systems for my team to be able to use it aren't going to, I'm not gonna have to burn through hours and hours and hours and hours and hours every day, in order to make sure that we're serving our audience. Thanks a
18:36
lot. Thanks a lot for saying that. And indeed, we we came up with a few ways how we can help you with getting started with social be basically one would be that Migration Service, which is especially helpful if you have a lot of existing evergreen content and a lot of settings in some other tool. Or maybe some people are just using Google Sheets to keep track of the poster they want to share next. So we can basically take the content that you have from other tools added to social beat. Or if you if you want basically to just for us to create that initial batch of content to set everything up, we can do that as well. And then also, just for for your audience to know, we currently are still offering a free one on one call with one of our specialists, you can just go to socialbee.io slash calendar, and you will be able to book a one on one call where one of my colleagues will walk you through the platform will answer any questions you might have. And this can be either before setting up a trial account or while you started your trial and maybe have some questions or even later on, because we're really committed to helping our customers succeed. And we know that social media can be challenging, especially if you don't have the experience. So that's why we're here we're here to help. That's great.
19:52
Ovi Negrean, you're the Co-Founder and CEO of SocialBee, and that's its socialbee that's b e e dot IO, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to
20:03
thank you very much.
20:05
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