It's free to join and very easy to create an account on Niume. The rules are pretty simple too. For instance, your articles must be written in English and it needs to have a minimum of 5 lines of text.
So, how does Niume make you feel welcome? Well, when I first joined the site, I got a message from them. Take a look at this pic:
Niume Blog & Support
Hi Freya, welcome to Niume!
We are a platform that gives people the chance to collaborate and share their work to connect with a huge and passionate audience of readers. In order to do so join your favourite spheres of interest and create your first post.
Also, if you have any feedback or problems using Niume send us a message here and we will answer ASAP!
P.S: if you have a twitter account send it over to us so we can tweet your posts to our large following so they can reach even more people :)
Maybe it's just something generic they send to all the new members of the site, but I like it because it gave the feeling that they cared about the people who joined Niume.
It gave the impression that the Niume admin were ready and willing to answer any questions their users might have for them, that they were there to help in case anyone needed it.
The question now is if anything on said message is actually true.
Well, on one hand, Niume does tweet your posts. I haven't sent my Twitter account to them, but I've received notifications of them having tweeted 2 of my Niume posts - this one and this one. Incidentally, these were my first 2 posts on the site.
I've joined a few spheres and I've written a few posts on the site already. Yes, there's the potential for your articles to be read by a lot of people since there are so many who are now a part of Niume.
But, let's be real here - unless you happen to get super lucky and super popular, it's very easy for your stuff to get lost there precisely because there are already so many other articles on the site.
If you're new and don't know anyone there, well, it's not really going to be easy to get a lot of readers to your posts, now, is it?
But, yes, Niume does give you the chance to connect with people. And you even have the opportunity to earn a little bit of money there. So, the first and third part of the message appear to be true.
And, yes, I'm aware that I ended up discussing the message out of order. It's intentional because the main point that really needs to be discussed is the second paragraph: "Also, if you have any feedback or problems using Niume send us a message here and we will answer ASAP!"
This was the part of the message that made me feel welcome. It reminded me of Buffer, a Twitter tweet scheduler, who says things like, "P.S. We're always around and love hearing from you. Please get in touch if you want to ask something or even just to say hello :)."
Seeing this part of the message from Niume was the reason why I didn't hesitate to send a message to them when I was having problems publishing my articles on the site. Of course, I wasn't expecting them to reply in minutes or something.
I never thought they'd never reply though.
Yes, even now, I've yet to receive a reply from them and I'm still having problems publishing my articles on the site, which is one reason why I don't post very often there. I like the site, but it's frustrating to have such a hard time posting my stuff there.
I have to publish the same thing over and over again, but it still won't show up on my profile as if I've never published it. Sigh :-(. Anyway, I'll talk more about this issue in another post.
But what about you? What do you think about Niume? Are you planning to join the site? If you're already a member, are you also having problems publishing your articles there?
As for Buffer, in my experience, they do respond to questions, but I'll talk more about that in another post.
*Notes:
- Image is a screenshot from my Niume account
