Social media are part of our lives, there is no question about it. To what extent are they also part of our business, especially in the vision industry? Vision Market monitors the social media activities and reach of leading companies in the machine vision industry on a regular basis. Out of the top 13 machine vision OEM brands as ranked by Vision Systems Design, nearly all of them use social media for their communication but they do it differently and with different success. What can we learn from that research?
It’s not all about size
To some extent, there is a correlation between the reach of a company on social media and its size. Not surprisingly, the companies with the largest number of followers in the machine vision industry are larger: Teledyne Flir and Cognex.
But is it all about the size? Not necessarily. One of the key benefits of social media is that by essence they allow an accurate segmentation of their audience: by geography, age, areas of interest, profession, etc. In a niche industry like machine vision, your goal should probably not be to reach as many people as possible but rather to reach those people that are relevant to your business. If you are yourself highly specialized in a specific product or service, territory or application area, it is okay to have a limited reach with your social media channels – as long as those people you reach are the right audience.
To some extent, there is a correlation between the reach of a company on social media and its size. Not surprisingly, the companies with the largest number of followers in the machine vision industry are larger: Teledyne Flir and Cognex.
But is it all about the size? Not necessarily. One of the key benefits of social media is that by essence they allow an accurate segmentation of their audience: by geography, age, areas of interest, profession, etc. In a niche industry like machine vision, your goal should probably not be to reach as many people as possible but rather to reach those people that are relevant to your business. If you are yourself highly specialized in a specific product or service, territory or application area, it is okay to have a limited reach with your social media channels – as long as those people you reach are the right audience.
Don’t compare yourself with Cognex or Teledyne Flir if you are addressing different markets. Check out how your direct competitors perform and be patient. Building a community doesn’t happen overnight.
Choose the right channels
There are a lot of social media channels out there and when planning your social media strategy, be mindful of which ones make sense for your goals and your audience. Our research shows that top machine vision brands are present on at least YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This is a good indication of the priorities you should set when building your social media presence. But some of the strongest brands are not present on all of these platforms, some even on none of them. And yet they are successful in the market.
Choosing the right channels depends on your goals, the audience you want to reach and your capacity to feed these channels with content. This should not be underestimated because a social media presence can only be successful if you are able to provide to your audience relevant content on a regular basis and in the long term.
Our recommendation: take one step at a time. There is nothing worse than having a Twitter or Facebook account with one post and two followers (yourself and your boss). Don’t attempt to do it all at once. It is okay not to be everywhere.
Be also mindful of geographical differences. Social media that are popular in your country may not be in others. For example, Russia, Japan, and China have very strong social media platforms that are not the Silicon Valley ones. So, if you want to target these markets, make sure to be present on these specific social media channels.
Content, content, content
Why should someone follow you on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook?
The answer is: because you offer them valuable content that they don’t want to miss. This shows how essential the content that you provide on your company pages is to your success.
Building a Twitter profile is easy, but it will remain an empty nutshell if you post two uninteresting tweets a year.
What is valuable content?
Generally speaking, it could be anything that your audience finds worth spending their precious time on. A lot of social media users value entertainment – that’s the proverbial cat video. But it could also be information, education, networking, finding a new job, etc.
Obviously, in a B2B environment, entertainment may not be the first thing you think of and sharing cat videos on LinkedIn is probably not a good idea. But bear in mind that your followers are not only engineers, they are human beings who also use social media privately. So even if your subject is serious, the way you convey it may be fun and entertaining. Think of a tutorial on a new product or technology: What are you more likely to watch, the boring PowerPoint slide deck or the animated cartoon?
The type of your content should be adapted to your audience, which will probably be different depending on the channel you use. For example, some B2B companies use LinkedIn to reach their business partners, customers, or potential new staff, while they may use Facebook or Instagram to communicate with their local communities or attract young graduates or apprentices. ‘
Our advice: Don’t just duplicate the same content across all platforms. Use the strengths of each social media channel to reach your specific goals.
One of the major challenges of managing a social media channel in an industry like ours is to generate enough content of the right quality to keep and grow your audience. Our advice: be creative! Don’t just announce the launch of your new product but tell a story about your company and its people. Share some views behind the scenes like the installation of a new machine in your factory or pictures of your employees wearing their costumes at work for Halloween. And now test yourself: Which of these two examples would you post on LinkedIn and which on Instagram?
While you should not duplicate the same content, recycle. Are you giving a speech at a conference? Share the recording on social media! Do you have a sales presentation of your new product? Reformat it to a short video clip introducing the key benefits to your followers!
Use the power of paid advertising
Every marketing campaign starts with the definition of a target customer, for example, system designers of medical lab equipment in Germany. Every user in social media provides comprehensive information about themselves: Who they are, where they live and work, what their areas of interest are. This is ideal to create precisely targeted campaigns to promote your products. You can use this information to create targeted campaigns that will be displayed only to system designers of medical lab equipment in Germany and nobody else, even if they don’t follow and even don’t know your company. This is a very effective way to invest your marketing money and be sure you will reach exactly your target audience.
So having a social media presence is not just having an official page and sharing content with your staff, existing customers, and business partners. It is also a great way to reach new market segments that you want to address with your products.
These are just a few of the relevant dos and don’ts you should consider when crafting your social media strategy. Do you feel overwhelmed by this task? We are happy to help. Our marketing experts can help you select the right channels, define your goals, create valuable content and distribute it to the right audience. We can even maintain your social media channels for you.
