Social Media for Engineers: Best Practices and Top Platforms

Social media is an easy and strategic method to promoting your content from blog posts to case studies.  However, to successfully create a social buzz, you must center social media to your target audience.  Catering social media posts to engineers is much different than promoting content targeted towards millennials.  This post will discuss the best practices for reaching engineers through social media and what platforms are most effective.

1. Define your social media goals

Define your goals for social media, including how social as an approach fits in with overall marketing strategy and goals.

Common social media goals include:

• Driving traffic to the company website or blog
• Generating new contacts
• Converting existing visitors to leads, and/or converting leads to marketing qualified leads
• Building a community with engaged contacts, customers, employees and partners to drive advocacy and brand loyalty
• Augmenting customer service, by providing an accessible customer service channel

Your specific goal(s) will impact the types of content you share, the amplification tactics you use and the success metrics, so goal setting is a vital first step when building a social strategy.

2. Know your audience

There will be two separate audiences that you will try to reach with your posts.  Your primary audience will consist of specific personas you are trying to target.  Your secondary audience will be broader in scope and will reach all other personas.

Be sure to keep in mind your target personas as you strategize and implement your social media plan.

 3. Promote new content (or updated past content)

The content you promote should be relevant to campaigns, clients, and potential clients.  If you are planning to use older content it should be refreshed and updated with new metrics and information as needed. 

Think of your social media channels as a way to keep your audience updated on all your latest resources, articles, company news, and industry news. Every time you publish a blog or launch a white paper, you should post to your social channels promoting your content.

Promote gated content, like white papers and webinar recordings, often to get more downloads.

Suggested content includes:

• Educational blog posts
• Case studies
• Product info
• Demos

How valuable are each of the following social media platforms when seeking information on the latest engineering technologies, industry trends, and products?

4. Post consistently

You should establish a schedule for social posts.  Test out different days of the week, look at the metrics, and find what days receive the most traffic.  Post frequency can range from once a week to once a weekday.  Find what works best for both you and your audience.

According to HubSpot, the best days to post on Linkedin (in order) are: Mondays, Wednesdays, then Tuesdays.

Many people will tell you that if you want to make a presence on social media, you need to post to your social channels every day. That may be helpful, but it’s not necessary. Think quality over quantity when it comes to social media posting. You don’t want to annoy your audience by over posting low-quality things. Be mindful and strategic about what you post.

We suggest posting 2-5 times a week. If you are just getting started with social media, start with two posts a week. As your content library and social media audience grows, you can start posting more frequently.

Marketing tools like HubSpot and Hootsuite allow you to schedule out your social media posts for months in advance. This saves you time and energy. 

HubSpot allows users to schedule out social media posts quickly and easily. 

Every post you share needs to have an image or graphic to grab your audience's attention. Studies and experience show that posts with images get more interactions than those with just text. Tweets with videos get over six times as many retweets as tweets with photos.

Create social media graphics like this to grab reader's attention on social media and detail your content offer. 

6. Monitor analytics + amplify your reach

Unless you already have a strong social media following, just sharing content to your existing followers is not enough. Consider ways to amplify your reach on social media, such as:

• Encouraging employees to share content and company posts out to their professional networks. This is an especially easy ask when employees are involved in the content creation.
• Using relevant hashtags to make posts more visible to relevant audiences who may be searching related topics.
• Running ads to amplify posts to targeted audiences.
• Engaging with users by promptly responding to comments and direct message within 12 to 24 hours. To grow your audience, you must actively engage with them!
• Joining relevant groups and engaging in the conversation with shared posts and commentary.

Lastly, it is important to constantly monitor your metrics.  If posts on a specific platform aren’t performing as well as posts on others, it may be best to concentrate your efforts elsewhere. 

LinkedIn gives you metrics on how many visitors viewed and interacted with your posts. This social media platform also breaks down audience demographic by job functions. 

Interested in learning more about B2B content marketing towards engineers?  Download our free Brand Positioning and Marketing Ebook. 

This post has been updated since its original publication.