How Beehiiv's Honeybee 🐝 Emoji took over X

Beehiiv has made waves on X by using a 🐝 emoji in its name, creating a recognizable brand identity on social media. On its company page, founder profile, and even employee accounts, you’ll see that same little bee.

This consistent emoji use has turned Beehiiv’s staff into virtual brand ambassadors, helping people connect the 🐝 directly to Beehiiv.

The Power of Emoji Branding

This clever emoji choice isn’t just about being cute—it builds instant recognition. When you see a 🐝 on X, it’s likely Beehiiv, and that’s memorable.

Adding a distinct emoji to your brand can help build loyalty and make your brand more recognizable in crowded digital spaces.

The Emoji Trend in Brand Marketing

Beehiiv isn’t the only one using emoji to stand out.

Morning Brew often uses a ☕ in its email subject lines, making their emails instantly recognizable in inboxes. Startup Spells does something similar with a 🪄 emoji, adding it to both email subject lines and social media profiles.

The Psychology Behind the Emoji Trick

This kind of brand association is similar to Pavlovian conditioning. Named after Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, this concept explains how our brains create automatic associations between unrelated elements.

Pavlov discovered this principle while studying dogs. He noticed that:

• Dogs naturally salivate when they see food

• By ringing a bell before feeding, dogs learned to associate the bell with food

• Eventually, the bell alone triggered salivation

The Power of Automatic Association

When you repeatedly see an emoji paired with quality content:

• Your brain creates an automatic association

• The emoji becomes a quality indicator

• You start recognizing the brand instantly through this simple symbol

It’s a powerful association tool that relies on memory and repetition to make an impact.

Beehiiv’s 🐝 emoji is more than just a fun symbol — it's a smart branding move.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Someone with time and money in their hands could use this loophole to spin up 100s of accounts and make a lot of money selling products by using the massive margins between Temu and Amazon. Definitely a grey area legally if you get caught.

Amazon will end the "no questions asked" return policy in future as it trains customers badly.

Apple, despite being so expensive, doesn't allow returns as easily as possible even if its their fault. This trains their customers to fully take on the risk.

This is the difference between Level 1 customer (poor) and Level 3 customer (rich) as stated in 3 Levels of Customers. $1000 for a poor person is 80% of their net worth while $1000 for a rich person is only 1% of their net worth.

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If someone provides you cheaper pricing, remember they either have a deal with their API provider or they have millions of customers.

An example would be Cursor AI where you can use $100 worth of code by paying only $20/month.

You can test this theory for 1 month using just API Keys and see how expensive it gets quickly.

The only reason it works is because there are 1000s of developers who only use $5 per month of tokens.

3/

This trick works for Copywriting as well as Facebook Ads. Laurel Portie says the same in her FB Ads book "Super Duper Profitable Ads."

Rabbit Holes

1. Everything You Need to Know About SEO in 38 Minutes by Grumpy SEO Guy

2. Tech Success for People in Their 20s - Adapt or Die by BowTiedFox

3. What are the first 3 things to do for a Brand New Domain by /r/SEO

Until next time!

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