My Business is Industrial Manufacturing – My Customers aren’t on Social Media, so why should I be?

I’m often asked by industrial manufacturing businesses if there is any benefit to them using social media. The short answer is yes, the longer answer is…

Well, for a start – are you sure? It’s still early days for social media in the industrial manufacturing sector, so your customers may not have a Business Page yet, although many do, but are you sure they don’t use Facebook or Twitter on a personal basis?

In the UK there are 30 million people on Facebook, around 12 million on Twitter, with 8 million using LinkedIn and I find it hard to believe that your customers don’t account for some of these huge numbers …

However, if I’m wrong, does it really matter? Every post on social media is indexed by search engines, so as long as you use your keywords, you have a chance of a search engine finding that tweet or update when a potential customer is searching for a product. Isn’t that reason enough?