3 Best Social Networks for Industrial Companies

YouTube is the world’s largest video-sharing social network and community. It may seem odd to see YouTube listed as a social media option for industrial companies. After all, YouTube is probably best known for its many videos of cats jumping in and out of boxes.

But despite its reputation as a time-wasting website, YouTube offers a lot of potential value to industrial companies like yours. That value lies in how-to videos and demonstrations. This is where you get the chance to show your potential clients exactly what you can do with all of your industrial equipment and manufacturing products.

Better yet, you can establish a reputation for yourself as one of the leading authorities in your industry. You’re showing people how your equipment works, why it’s important, and how you help your clients. For anyone who’s still in the research process, those videos are worth their weight in gold.

Plus, it’s always nice to see that a potential business partner knows what they’re doing. That’s what you’re demonstrating when you post these videos on YouTube. After you post them, you can promote the videos by linking to them on your other social media accounts — especially LinkedIn.

Then, you can also add the video to pages on your site (called “embedding”) so your visitors can see it while reading relevant information. That’ll also give your page a big SEO bump since Google loves to see videos on your site. All in all, that means YouTube gives you another social option, a great way to demonstrate your expertise, and SEO power all at the same time.

Just like with LinkedIn, you can start today with a free account.

Facebook is the single largest social network in the world, with more than 1 billion active daily users. That means any business — even industrial businesses — can find potential leads on this social network.

Facebook users mostly log into their accounts during free time, though, which means your approach to earning new leads on Facebook should be different from earning leads on LinkedIn.

To start, you can create an account for yourself and then a page for your business. After that, you can fill in all the information Facebook requires, including profile and header photos. The photos may not seem important, but they’re a great way to reinforce your brand and show customers that you’re an active presence online.

The alternative is to keep Facebook’s default images, but those make it look like you don’t know what you’re doing online. And as we mentioned above, it’s critical that you inspire confidence in your brand when you use social media. That means using unique photos, regularly posting updates to your business page, and even occasionally sharing your business’s updates on your personal page. But the beauty of Facebook is how easily you can reach thousands of people at one time.

To start, post something to your page about your industry. That could be a blog post from your site, a video from YouTube, or even just a thought that your followers would find interesting. Then, users who follow your business’s page will see your update. That could be anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred people. But once they start sharing or commenting on your post, your followers can make your post more visible. It’ll show up in the feeds of your followers’ friends, meaning your post doesn’t just reach your initial audience — it can reach hundreds or thousands of others.

This snowball effect is the biggest benefit of marketing on Facebook. Everything you say has the potential to echo to thousands of other people because of how Facebook designed its algorithm.

So regardless of your industrial company’s specialty, you can almost certainly find at least one person who would be interested in your services.

That person might be an entry-level team member at a business, or they could be a key decision-maker that could sign a contract with you. Either way, you’re making progress when you expose your brand to a new audience. It builds brand awareness at the very least, and it has the potential to bring new people to your site to learn more about you.

Best of all, you can post links to your other social media profiles to build cross-platform synergy. That lets you reach the same people in multiple places online, increasing the chances that they’ll eventually convert into a new lead.

With all of that, you have three powerful marketing methods that you can start today — and they’re all free!