Metalworking businesses seem like the type of place where traditional advertising would continue to work well, but as business owners in other industries have learned, social media is the place to be. Here are some reasons why that’s becoming increasingly true!
Check out these reasons you’ll want to embrace social media.
Your customers are there
Facebook has now exceeded 1 billion users, which is a substantial percentage of the entire online world of users.
That means social media is here to stay, and it’s a place you’ll need to operate, if you want to be represented in the places where your customers are actually spending their time and having conversations about products like yours.
You can start conversations where there weren’t any
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are great social sites where businesses have been able to start conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. By doing so, they generated awareness and trials for their products and services.
Profiles on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google+ are all free of charge, so there’s almost no reason to avoid these networks, and the potential to start conversations and gain customers there.
A great example of this is the legendary viral marketing campaign called “Will it blend?”, which used YouTube to show various items being blended in a Blendtec blender. In a world where blenders were viewed as a commodity that’s difficult to generate consumer interest and conversation about, this creative but simple usage of social media was able to get millions of views and thousands of conversations started.
What type of unusual thing could you do with your product, that might make a fun video for people to suggest to a friend? There are all kinds of possibilities in the metalworking industry!
Hashtags and semantics are now targets for advertising
The beauty of social media really comes to life when you realize the ability to advertise to potential customers based on the specific words those people have used in social media discussions. For instance, let’s say you have a site that sells Jet machinery or parts.
If a customer on Twitter says “I’m loving my old machine; just hope I can find Jet parts somewhere,” you actually have the ability to search for that person, and find him (or her).
A simple search on Twitter for “Jet parts” would pull up this exact tweet, and you can reach out to the customer from there!
