Week 8 part A

 In the business I’m creating, visual support is useful to grow the business organically on Social Media platforms. On Instagram, there are Social Media businesses and accounts that have been heavily followed by using visual support to show beekeeping. In once case, the Social Media business, Texas Bee Works with Erika Thompson has a large number of followers due to your visual video’s; however, one of the reasons is her lack of wearing beekeeping protection while handling bees. The visuals are very nice but the combination of visuals and lack of safety has drawn both positive and negative audiences but, this has resulted in an overall large following which may have been part of her strategy. For those working in beekeeping, comments reflect that she has poor safety practices and that anyone who performs the same activities while thinking western honeybees are friendly, will surely find themselves on the wrong side of the learning curve, especially if you don’t know how you will react to a bee sting. I feel that she uses visual media and hashtags to successfully promote herself and she draws a large following, about a million, which allowed her to be a features speaker on Joe Rogan’s podcast, so, she has marketed herself well. Her hashtags include bees, beekeeper, beekeeping, insects, nature, and savingthebees and she posts consistently on her Instagram account, a video every month.

MannLakeLtd is a business started in 1983 to supply beekeeping equipment including bee boxes, bee frames, bee suits, tools, bee rearing equipment, bees and queens, etc. The Instagram account visual media mainly focuses on product for sale from the business, the do not seem to have engaging video’s like Texas Bee Works. The business does not have a lot of followers comparatively, they have 7,350 followers compared to the million followers that Erika Thompson has on her account. The visual design is primarily images of pruducts and some of the images attempt to provide useful information to new beekeepers but it is very limited. Additionally, one image is to help customers pick-out the correct breed of bees for them and the link presented is no hyperlinked, so this isn’t effective from a media perspective. They use tags which include mannlake, beekeeping, beekeepers, and beebreeds and post regularly. While they are a national business that supplies large number of beekeepers, their Instagram traffic is light overall and, in my opinion, should be much larger.

Bee hero is a new beekeeping technology company that has an Instagram account with 721 followers. The beehero.io account has a small following and technology with investors behind it that have provide over 40 million dollars to work on the technology. Bee hero has a combination of media, including images and video’s on their Instagram account. Most of the information focuses on managing hives, keeping them healthy with more real-time data, and value to farmers that need pollination services, especially in the Almond groves. The technology has real potential to save beekeepers significant costs knowing that a hive has an issue however, they do not discuss the cost of the technology versus hive losses. For each hive with a sensor, you can monitor the colony and the system determines if there is an issue with the hives health so you can address it quickly. This business manages 11,000 bee colonies and they have very low traffic on Instagram. They use hashtags such as bees, pollination, honeybee, almondpollination, centralcalifornia and beehero. With the amount of capital behind them, to me, they are a nationwide large technology business with very few followers.

In Summary, the question must be why is TexasBeeWorks so successful using visual media with a huge number of followers in a small amount of time? Erika Thompson was born in 1986 and has a million followers, whereas Mann Lake has been supplying beekeepers nationally since 1983 and has less than 1 percent of her follower numbers at 7,350. Additionally, Erika has 9 million followers on TikTok which seems to drive some of the traffic to Instagram. Beekeeping is an old-school business and I believe Erika was able to drive traffic based on the risk she takes while working with bees, her age, looks, and personality. It seems that an individual’s appearance doing interesting things is more highly marketable then say, a 50-year-old man with more subject knowledge doing the same beekeeping tasks when it comes to Social Media marketing. That probably sounds socially incorrect but in terms of interest and marketing, I feel that may be what is happening here. My thought process is that if Mann Lake want’s to drive a larger following, they can create more exciting video’s with a younger generation interested in beekeeping. You could use the same group to travel to exotic places and see different cultures performing beekeeping in the video’s as well. If all else fails, they could use a service to drive your Instagram follower growth.