Published today, our latest ‘Social Success’ white paper for B2B electronics marketers reveals in great detail who’s winning the social media battle in the semiconductor industry. Although focused on semiconductors, the paper gives valuable insights to any company selling components, sub-assemblies, software or services into the electronic engineering community.
(Click infographic to enlarge)
This year, we’ve refined the research methodology to attribute greater importance to engagement, rather than just numbers of followers. In other words, we are prioritising ‘interest’ over simple ‘awareness’. We’ve looked at how companies are using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and blogs, and there are some startling results.
Download the free white paper here
For example, semiconductor companies have a total following of over 50 million across these channels, although this includes duplication where individuals follow a company in multiple channels. Intel dominates by number of followers but has relatively low engagement rates. Infineon leads the pack for overall social media performance when engagement levels and best practices are taken into account.
Determining the degree to which social media success leads to sales success is still a challenge for all of the many semiconductor companies we’ve met with this year. However, it is clear that more engineers than ever are using social media channels, despite the relatively poor showing of these in research studies such as UBM’s ‘Mind of the Engineer’. To what extent they’re being used for serious business research, rather than entertainment trivia is another important question which future research needs to address. One EE Times blog post that generated most engagement a couple of years ago was an amusing piece by Brian Fuller (now editor-in-chief at ARM) that discussed the tidiness or otherwise of engineers’ desks. I can’t think of a serious technical blog post that ever generated so much conversation, before or since.
It’s also clear that companies addressing the hobbyist community with lots of interesting trivia attract more followers and more engagement than those that focus purely on deeply technical content for more senior engineers. But, as someone pointed out to me recently, Bill Gates was a hobbyist once, so it’s a community that shouldn’t be ignored!
Publitek’s 2015 Social Success white paper is an immensely informative report for any serious digital marketer working within the electronics industry. If you’re in the semiconductor industry, it’s a must-read. If you score well, it’s something to show your boss. If you don’t do so well, it’s an invaluable guide to how to improve. If you need help to do better, please get in touch!
