The next generation of engineering will be defined by optimizing SW-HW integration
How should IC manufacturers and other electronics product/service marketers go about reaching their target audience of engineering professionals? This is the golden question many companies wrestle with every day. Whether engineers are actively shopping or want to learn something new, marketers have an opportunity to expose their target audience to new products, services, methodologies and important trends that drive innovation.
Social media is a huge factor in today’s digital landscape that helps drive engagement, build legitimacy, and ultimately move engineers into the sales funnel. If your company wants to bring its message directly to designers of all experience levels, we’ve compiled some of the best platforms for social media marketing you’ll find on the internet.
Best Platforms for Social Media Marketing
The social media landscape is broad and posting to the wrong platforms is like throwing content into a digital black hole. Therefore, it is important that you know which sub-groups frequent which sites and what types of content perform better on which social media outlets to optimize your social media marketing with engineers of all levels.
The platforms listed below serve audiences ranging from students to experienced professionals and content types ranging from written to video, interactive, and user-generated. With this in mind, let’s dive into the best platforms for social media marketing.
By far, the king of professional social media platforms is LinkedIn. This is probably the go-to option for companies who want to implement a social media strategy to reach a professional audience, including engineers and students. Most companies use LinkedIn to promote their blog, webinar, user polls, newsletter signups, or other proprietary content as part of an audience outreach strategy. However, LinkedIn offers many other features for large technology companies and individual entrepreneurs, including streaming, news features, and articles for professional users.
- Audience composition: Broad, ranging from students to professionals
- Content tone: Professional
- Supported content types: Written, video, live broadcasting, user-generated articles
The old standby platform that started the social media movement is Facebook, and it seems just about every legitimate company maintains some presence on the platform. Facebook has gone beyond simply allowing users to collect friends and follow pages. Now supporting video content and live streaming are available. In addition, Facebook has many groups dedicated to every engineering area, which is used by an international audience. Companies that want to reach their audience with a fun, informal tone should include Facebook as part of their outreach strategy.
- Audience composition: Broad, ranging from students to professionals
- Content tone: Informal
- Supported content types: Shared posts, videos, live streaming
X (formerly Twitter)
X gives anyone a simple way to follow their favorite influencers, celebrities, or even engineering personalities. When reaching an engineering audience, X is best used to post company news and product updates, and share events. Any engineering content that is short, shareable, and has accompanying images or videos is a candidate for sharing on Twitter.
- Audience composition: Broad, ranging from students to professionals
- Content tone: Informal
- Supported content types: Shared posts, video snippets
Reddit is a community-based website where engineers can seek help or advice about design issues, which components to use and where to find them, or simply trade tips, experience, or other information that colleagues would find helpful. The site allows users to post text, imagery, and videos. Readers can comment and engage in dialog with the originator of the post or anyone interested in the topic.
An interesting twist is that users get to vote up or down for posts. The more favorable a post – based on vote count – the higher it ranks on the site, similar to how search engine results pages (SERPs) on search engines like Google are arranged. Communities, or subreddits, are self-managed but must adhere to some general guidelines to promote healthy discussion and avoid conflicts.
- Audience composition: Broad, but communities/subreddits may be structured to attract members with similar or specific interests
- Content tone: Varies
- Supported content types: Written Q&A, images, and video snippets
YouTube
YouTube is probably the most efficient outlet for accessing and viewing engineering content, and companies are taking advantage of this. The classic way of using YouTube is to create instructional content for your target audience, ranging from product-agnostic content to product-specific. In addition, Youtube’s commenting, and Stories features now allow companies to reach their subscriber base with branded content and product or feature updates.
- Audience composition: Broad, ranging from students to professionals
- Content tone: Varies
- Supported content types: Video
TikTok, Youtube Shorts, and Facebook Reels
If you want to do anything with short-form video content, it must be posted on these three channels. While these platforms aren’t known for engineering content, they are certainly a favorite among young people, including young engineers. Therefore, companies who want to stay current with digital marketing trends must implement a strategy that leverages these platforms with concise, targeted video content. The goal of leveraging these platforms is to grow a subscriber or follower base, which can then be marketed with other content types.
- Audience composition: Broad, ranging from students to professionals
- Content tone: Informal
- Supported content types: Video snippets
Social media marketing is a very effective way to garner the attention of and attract engineers at all career levels. However, your marketing strategy must be guided by audience and content data as for the list above to ensure that you are reaching engineers that have interest and can benefit from your products and services. This is especially important for connecting with young professionals that will comprise the next generation of engineers.
Engineers are no different than other professionals today in terms of attention spans, which are short. Therefore, as an engineering marketer, you should incorporate an engineer’s mindset into your marketing strategy and provide your audience with information about components and design tools that can enhance their workflow and production. Executing this strategy for the best platforms for social media marketing is most effective by partnering with a respected and trusted online electronics component library provider.
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