You might be asking yourself: “Why would someone ever want to get involved in social media without having a blog?” Many manufacturers will say that they don’t have anything to write about in a blog or that their customers won’t read their blog. However, these are all things you can get around. Let your creative juices flow, and you’ll come up with interesting topics to write about. If you have interesting things to say, people will find your blog and read it. So the real, and only, reason why your manufacturing company doesn’t have a blog is because you don’t have the resources to maintain it. And every marketer knows that an abandoned blog is worse than no blog at all.
So how can you establish a presence on social media without a blog? It’s actually not as impossible as you might think.
Promote What You’ve Got
Manufacturing companies are some of the best at gathering case studies and other collateral. For years you’ve known that your customers love this kind of content, but you can get a lot more mileage out of it by sharing it on social media. And I’m guessing you have a lot of other content already on your website that you can promote as well:
- Videos
- Picture of applications
- Guides
- Product pictures
- Product data sheets
- Press releases
- Whitepapers
- Tradeshow listings
- New product releases
Take stock of the content you already have and find ways to share it on social media. While approaching social media this way might be a little dry, it’s a great way to at least get your feet wet and see what your followers like.
Infuse Some Creativity
Everyone’s busy, but getting creative with social media doesn’t have to be time consuming. You can take the content you already have and just tweak it. For instance, all those great pictures of applications you have could be transformed into memes. Or maybe you have a whitepaper full of great statistics about your industry, product or service. Why not turn that into an infographic or simply tweet out the statistics one by one? Come up with creative original content as well. For one of my clients, we have a question of the week that’s related to their industry. It requires only a little bit of time to research good questions. I’ve also tried sharing facts about a particular industry, brief excerpts from whitepapers and eBooks, quotes, and more.
Curate Content Your Customers Love
So you say your company doesn’t have content that’s shareable? What do you do? Curate content.
The easiest way to do this is to set up some Google Alerts for key topics in your industry and watch the alerts flow into your mailbox. You can also go directly to authoritative websites in your industry and see what blog posts or articles they have that might pique the interest of your audience. Even Pinterest can be a good resource for content curation. You’d be surprised by the variety of topics people pin images about.
Get Started Now
Social media isn’t rocket science, and there isn’t an exact formula for how to do it. Not having a corporate blog might mean you have to get a little more creative or resourceful, but it doesn’t mean social media is completely impossible for your manufacturing company. Try out any combination of these strategies and monitor your posts over time to see what your audience engages with most. Your social media strategy will continue to evolve the more you do it, so don’t be afraid to jump right in and take some risks…even without a blog.