How to Engage with Your Industrial Audience on Social Media

Laura Ross Feb 24, 2023

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people using social media on their smartphones with emojis of hearts, thumbs ups, and smiley faces floating out

If you tweet about a product launch and nobody hits “like” did you really even post it?

This question 一 or at least something to that effect 一 should be front of mind for any industrial business looking to leverage the power of social media to grow its brand.

As of 2023, social media platforms have a whopping 4.9 billion users, with the average person active on the sites for two hours and thirty-five minutes every day. Businesses should not ignore its potential for growing its customer base, recruiting top talent, and building brand awareness.

But an industrial business’s thought leadership blogs, brand announcements, and whip-sharp quips mean nothing if they ultimately fail to connect with your prospective customers. You need likes, comments, shares, “@mentions”, click-throughs, and conversions to truly reap the benefits of sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Here are four top tips for driving audience engagement on social media.

1. Provide a Clear Call to Action

If you’ve ever been advised on how to write an article, develop a marketing campaign, deliver a presentation, or win a debate, it was probably this: tell the reader what you’re about to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them.

By following this rule, you ensure the information you present is informative, relevant, and succinct. You keep your audience engaged and, most importantly, they understand your motives.

It won’t always make sense to prescriptively follow this rule on social media 一 not least because there are often word-count limits or optimum video lengths. Having said that, you can always feature a clear and concise call to action (CTA):

Read this article…
Check out our website…
Get involved in this campaign…
Apply for this job…
Reply here for more information…
Sign up for our newsletter…
Request a product demo…
Download the ebook…
Respond to our poll…

CTAs like these will prevent your social media posts from turning into internet tumbleweed, by making it straightforward for your audience to engage in the ways you want them to.

2. Know Your Audience

You probably don’t need me to tell you that what works on one social media platform won’t work on another.

At one end of the spectrum is TikTok, whose users expect instant gratification. Here, short, snappy, and quirky videos peppered with music and sound effects are the aim of the game.

LinkedIn is at the other end, with a professional and more formal tone. Its users are more inclined to engage in academic discourse or click through to a long-read article.

If your target audience is concentrated within a specific social media sphere, you can tailor your messaging and tone accordingly. However, to engage meaningfully with people across various platforms, you’ll need to develop a range of different social media strategies.

For example, you might use TikTok to get people talking about your brand, Instagram for advertising your products and services, Twitter for distributing content, and LinkedIn and Facebook for lead generation and recruitment.

Once you’ve established a reasonable following on social media, consider leveraging in-app polls to gather feedback and input from your audience. Yes, those ”what do you guys want to see more of?” influencer posts actually work. It’s all about giving people what they want.

3. Profile Your Team

Social media is supposed to connect people, so it makes sense to bring a human touch to the content you produce.

Showcase the fantastic people behind your logo, your marketing campaigns, and your slick sales pitches. You could produce “day-in-the-life” or “ask-me-anything” videos for publication on your company pages. You could also encourage your workforce to advocate for you on their personal profiles. They could write content, share job listings, or post about the great community work you’re doing.

Your social media followers are much more likely to strike up a conversation with your workers than they are with your brand.

4. Profile Your Followers

Leveraging the human touch also applies in the context of your customer base.

Your audience is interested in what your people have to say because they can validate the claims you make about company culture, brand integrity, and employee benefits.

Your customers can also act as advocates; speaking to product quality and customer service. Be sure to profile your biggest clients, share glowing testimonials, and produce case studies that detail the great work you’ve achieved.

Remember that your social media audience has far more to offer than the occasional customer review. Your followers are likely to share your interest in the industrial sector and many of them will have interesting things to say about it.

Distribute and directly engage with the content you find relevant and interesting to demonstrate authenticity and subject-matter expertise. You’ll notice that when you consistently promote your followers’ content, they’ll find their way back to your pages and return the favor.