The 7th edition of Publitek’s semiconductor social media report brought to light, as ever, some findings that for those of us involved in semiconductor industry marketing are worth exploring.
It’s no accident that the top 3 performing companies – AMD, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA – all have significant B2C profiles and, as a result, follower numbers in their millions as opposed to thousands. While the results of the research reward quality as opposed to just quantity the fact that these businesses have reached a point whereby their social media is reaching huge numbers of people tends to have a “trickle-down” effect across all their platforms – how much effort they put into these platforms and how highly they value them. Having said all of that, just having a brand that is recognizable to consumers is not the only factor. There are plenty of examples in the league table of ‘household’ names who, through not having consistent approaches across the channels, do not score anywhere near as well overall.
| # | Company | Blog | YouTube | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AMD | 5 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| 2 | Qualcomm | 3 | 2 | 12 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| 3 | NVIDIA | 1 | 18 | 10 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 4 | MediaTek | 9 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 21 |
| 5 | Micron Technology | 4 | 7 | 3 | 10 | 25 | 4 |
| 6 | STMicroelectronics | 7 | 3 | 17 | 12 | 9 | 8 |
| 7 | Intel | 15 | 11 | 20 | 4 | 7 | 7 |
| 8 | Xilinx | 6 | 15 | 14 | 9 | 25 | 5 |
| 9 | ARM | 16 | 8 | 25 | 8 | 11 | 12 |
| 10 | ON Semiconductor | 2 | 27 | 3 | 22 | 12 | 16 |
Engagement is once again a standout factor from the report – due to the fact that it is so low. In 2020 the rate dropped from 0.0003% to 0.0002% across all companies and platforms. This is revealing from two aspects, firstly, with such an incredibly low engagement rate it’s clear that there is room for improvement and the majority of companies featured are guilty of treating all platforms generically and therefore posting content that is not platform appropriate…and which gets no engagement. Secondly, the world of social media and the battle for attention gets more ferocious year on year and therefore continuous improvement is a base requirement just to stay still. With so many calls on the time of marketing departments, and their budgets, the fast-moving iteration or sudden changing of strategy can leave many B2B players looking a little leaden-footed, and therefore engagement drops.
As a final observation, it’s really surprising that blogs and blogging continue to represent such a barrier to the majority of semiconductor brands. Over two-thirds of the companies featured failed to post less than once per week across 2020. The simple fact is that with such a sporadic approach to blogging these companies will fail against their competitors from an SEO viewpoint and with anything from 70% to 90% of B2B purchases resulting from an initial search engine inquiry, this failure is proving costly.
