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My business is industrial manufacturing – my customers aren’t on social media, so why should I be?

I’m often asked by industrial manufacturing businesses if there is any benefit to them using social media. The short answer is yes, the longer answer is…

Well, for a start – are you sure? It’s still early days for social media in the industrial manufacturing sector, so your customers may not have a Business Page yet, although many do, but are you sure they don’t use Facebook or Twitter on a personal basis?

In the UK there are 30 million people on Facebook, around 12 million on Twitter, with 8 million using LinkedIn and I find it hard to believe that your customers don’t account for some of these huge numbers …

However, if I’m wrong, does it really matter? Every post on social media is indexed by search engines, so as long as you use your keywords, you have a chance of a search engine finding that tweet or update when a potential customer is searching for a product. Isn’t that reason enough?

Written by: Lesley Whiteman, Social Media Manager, ID-Marketing

 

Everyone says we should be on Twitter and Facebook, so let’s do it

I think there are many companies who have got to this point, and it’s probably the worst reason to get involved with social media.

Let’s press the pause button and consider …

  • Your business goals
  • How will social media help you achieve them?
  • What does success look like?
  • What’s your strategy to get there?

If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions, then do give us a call and we can help through the process.

Once you’ve answered these questions then it’s time to implement, but do keep referring back to keep yourself on track with your strategy.

Written by: Lesley Whiteman, Social Media Manager, ID-Marketing

My business is manufacturing – should I be using social media?

I think it’s fair to say that industrial manufacturing companies haven’t yet jumped, en masse, into the social media arena. Some are using it and it’s working very nicely for them, but I think a lot of companies are still sceptical and are sitting on the side lines, watching, a bit like many did when the internet boom first started over 10 years ago.  As with the internet, it was the early adopters who had massive success, which leaves you in a unique position now. Get involved, set the standard and reap the rewards, or spend years wishing you’d got involved at the outset.

Google makes a fortune from its “pay per click” advertising, because most people who use the internet use Google to find what they want. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you. But did you know that Facebook gets more page views per month than Google, and Twitter isn’t far behind?

The role of internet marketers is to increase traffic to their client’s website.  So if several of the world’s most visited websites are already allowing people to use their sites freely to guide people to specific websites, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

Google now recognise Tweets in their organic results – and high up, too. There are hundreds of thousands of Twitter profiles showing on page 1 of Google for valuable keyword terms. Google also allows Facebook profiles and commercial “pages” to rank as well.

In short, these social media sites are SEO friendly, they love fresh content and allow you to post virtually anything you want at any time.  Social media and SEO work well together, like strawberries and cream. Either are fine on their own, but put them together and something magical happens!

I recently read a report from Global Spec entitled “Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector” which stated that industrial professionals are still largely passive users of social media, preferring to read and watch content, versus creating and sharing content; nonetheless they’re involved, and perhaps, you should be too.

Written by: Lesley Whiteman, Social Media Manager, ID-Marketing

What is PR?

The creation of easily digested information regarding products and services. By presenting genuine information in a quickly assimilated way we are helping engineers to stay up-to date with developments and trends so that they can quickly solve problems in design or production. This presents a wider profile of possibilities and helps optimise the innovation cycle.

Dissemination to enable it to be easily found – build a better mousetrap and people will NOT beat a path to your door – unless they actually need a mousetrap and know about yours! This is a genuine need – by putting our information where it can easily be found we are serving that need. People sometimes need to be told that a) mousetraps exist, b) some mousetraps are different/better/cheaper than others and which is which. A whole range of media publications have grown up to serve this need on a wider basis from the national press to Google, to a plethora of very small but very targeted publications.