Composites gets social!

CIMOct17Feature - aro1
CIMOct17Feature - aro1

Aro PR and Marketing’s director, Billy McKenna explains how social media is changing the way we engage, communicate, and how we find out information that influences our opinions.

 

Baffled by social media? Some engineers find social media confusing and pointless. A few years ago, when we first researched the importance of these channels to the composites industry, we found social media was not as popular as in other industries. This meant engineering companies were missing out on a huge opportunity to position themselves and connect with both existing and potential customers.

Thankfully, the tide has turned. Evidence shows that today, social media engagement within composites is increasing at a rate of knots which means the industry is now taking advantage of the opportunity offered by these communication channels.

For engineering companies, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are generally the most important social media channels. They are popular with different audiences for different reasons.

Twitter is more widely used by manufacturers in general, though still with a role in the personal, not just the business context. LinkedIn is the most business focused of the social media channels, where ‘profiles’ act as online CVs, detailing experiences - both through work and education - and individuals connect and follow each other’s profile based on business relationships.

As a video sharing platform, YouTube operates differently to the others and works often as a simple search engine. Many people will use it to find information instead of more traditional search engines such as Google or Bing and it can increase brand awareness dramatically.

Facebook is more orientated to personal communications with family and friends, though it does have a strong role in business to consumer marketing, less so in composites or engineering. However, it is slowly on the rise, though Twitter and LinkedIn are more effective in spreading messages wider and to more targeted engineering audiences.

Aro PR and Marketing’s director, Billy McKenna

Let’s look at each of the main channels in a little more detail – first LinkedIn. If you enter the word ‘composites’ into the search bar, it will offer: 235,605 people who mention composites within their profile; 4,466 companies; 178 groups (areas for special interests) and 173 job opportunities. ‘Groups’ on LinkedIn are leading the way with, for example, the Composites Industry Forum having nearly 20,000 members - a 40% increase since 2014 – while the group COMPOSITES has over 26,000 members, an increase of almost 50% in the last three years.

The groups include employees from OEMs, suppliers, tradeshows, trade bodies and composites focused media publications, who are all looking to interact and keep up to date with the latest industry news and innovations. It is also a great way to source new employees.

Moving onto Twitter. Hashtags (#), which are a means of categorising communications into topics, make it easier to search for other relevant tweets. #ukmfg (UK Manufacturing), #composites and #IIOT (Industrial Internet of Things) are consistently making an appearance in posts from industry media, tradeshows, OEMS and even smaller players within the supply chain. In 2014, 55 tweets were found using #composites within a period of one month, now we reach that number within a few days!

In 2015, YouTube was hailed as the second largest search engine on the web with people preferring to watch videos to find information rather than read it. When searching ‘engineering’, over 20 million results appeared; and with ‘composites’ there were over 1½ million results, from polished corporate videos to product demonstration footage taken on mobile phones.

Still not convinced?

Graham Mulholland, managing director of epm: technology, comments: “Social media is a big part of any organisation’s marketing strategy, using social media to showcase to the external market daily activities, recent project achievements, up and coming news, etc.

“In a world where social media is part of most people’s daily lives, this new form of contact is required in the composite market as it gives an insight into an at times confidential industry and reaches out to a multitude of people and potential new customers.

“We also use these channels to inspire the next generation to become involved in engineering and the composite industry to help narrow the skills gap.”

Indeed, young engineers and composites professionals prefer to consume their information through social media. That’s how they like to communicate and it is incumbent on the industry to meet these needs.

As well as reaching out to younger audiences, social media has other benefits. It can be more cost-effective than paid advertising, it can be engaging, done within a matter of seconds and can drive traffic straight to your website. Latest figures show that around a third of all website visitors are from social media.

The benefits are: you can decide what information is shared, not a third party; social media channels such as Instagram and Pinterest are photo sharing platforms, which can promote your products and other achievements, like an online catalogue or brochure; results on search engines can be improved. For example, Google and Bing pay attention to social signals, so the more posts that are liked and link back to your website, the higher your website will appear on search results; you can enhance relationships with all those important to your business such as suppliers and staff, not just customers.

A way of reaching out

Though social media channels are gaining in importance in the composites industry, we’re not at the levels we need to be. Ken Doig of Formaplex takes this up: “I don’t believe the supply chain fully utilises the opportunities available for brand/product promotion through social media.

“We live in a world where product and brand promotion on social media is growing across all markets; composites shouldn’t be left behind. You have to keep track of what your customers and potential customers are looking at and aim for the right areas.

“Not all business users will look at Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, however, LinkedIn and Twitter can be useful to promote a company and gain brand/product visibility in a wider market.”

So, don’t get left behind. Join the social media gang today and start showing off your composite capabilities!

To explore this further, visit Aro (stand J122) at the Advanced Engineering Show.

www.aroprandmarketing.co.uk

 

 

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