November 2023 Volume 5

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Growing Socially: Utilizing Social Media Within the Manufacturing Industry By Niamh Field

While tradition should be embraced in many aspects of our lives, prioritizing tradition in your business and marketing strategies can be detrimental for company growth and innovation. Many manufacturing companies, being traditionally oriented, risk being left behind as digital and social media transforms itself into customer management and communication, market research, and brand awareness. The good news is that social media is user-friendly and monetarily free for you to begin using! Managing a multitude of social media platforms may be a daunting idea to rookie users, but simple organizational resources such as Hootsuite, a social media management platform, can provide guidance and tools to assist you in your journey of digital presence. In this age of digital media, ensuring that a company has a digital presence is more important than ever. This digital presence includes a user-friendly website, enticing and well-assembled email blasts, and of course, a social media presence. The importance of leveraging digital and social media presents itself in LinkedIn research as it shows that 75% of business-to-business buyers use social media to make their purchasing decisions (Alfred, 2023), and 82% of industrial manufacturers interact on LinkedIn (WebFX 2023). While other social media platforms such as Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok exist and should be used when it analytically makes sense to, LinkedIn is king for manufacturing business endeavors. Personally, I have found that Instagram and Facebook are great for event recaps and the more entertaining sides of business, whereas LinkedIn is best for informing customers, prospecting and gaining new customers, and seeking information on what competitors may be doing. I began my position with Forging Industry Association at the end of February 2023. My pursuit of a marketing degree and experience in digital media and B2B sales landed me a job as the Digital Marketing and Social Media Intern. As I prepared myself to take on the role, I took the liberty of scouring the current state of FIA's

social media pages and platforms. Specifically, I took most interest in the association and foundation LinkedIn pages, as most of the organization’s interactions are B2B. From my research, I found a lot of room for improvement. As my internship has progressed, I have made changes such as creating content that encourages more engagement, ideating new campaigns, and implementing Hootsuite. As a social media marketing team of two people with busy schedules, Hootsuite has allowed us to streamline our content and interactions with users online. Hootsuite supports this by providing tools such as scheduling posts, analytics, and an inbox to see comments across all social media channels. In addition to leveraging Hootsuite for scheduling posts and monitoring page analytics, the implementation of campaigns that involve members and the history of FIA have made the LinkedIn pages top performing posts. You may have caught these campaigns in your feed: Women in Forging Wednesday (WiF Wednesday) and Flashback Friday. Women In Forging Wednesday has been a successful social media campaign implemented by FIA to highlight the hardworking women within our industry every other Wednesday. These posts were enjoyed and well-interacted with as users saw themselves, their peers, and their friends being featured on our page. Flashback Friday has been our second most successful social media campaign. These videos and pictures provide pieces of FIA history for members and previous members to enjoy. Highlighting people and events that align with your business’ values and work is a great way to interact with your following on social media and bring more engagement to your pages. Since much of the forging industry consists of B2B engagement, let’s look at FIA’s own “before and after” LinkedIn analytics. From March 2023 through mid-October 2023, our page following has increased from 5.7k to 6.5k, showing a gain of 875 followers. Our engagement rate has also increased by 1.92% compared to 2022, along with our page impressions.

FIA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2023 44