Beyond Facebook and Twitter – Reaching Engineers on Social Media

Finding Engineers on Social Media: LinkedIn, Google+ and Forum sites            

Last week I posted about 6 steps to 1M Facebook followers, but what about other social media?

You’ve probably heard that Google+ is an important social media platform for engineers.  And there are good conversations happening on LinkedIn.  And there are a number of highly targeted engineering forums. In this post we’ll explore whether it’s worth your effort to go there.

If you search Google+ communities with the term “engineers” you’ll find a lot of small groups.  They don’t have nearly as many members as the similarly titled LinkedIn groups.  The long-standing forums like Eng-tips have a lot more members.  This chart is based on similarly titled groups on the various sites.  For Eng-tips I used their email count as a proxy for the membership of groups.

Marketers can add their content pieces pretty easily to Google+ and LinkedIn groups, so long as the moderator doesn’t consider them too promotional.  I suggest you do that on LinkedIn.  At this point, there doesn’t seem to be enough activity in the Google+ groups to make them worthwhile unless you can post with an automated tool like Hootsuite. As for the paid services, many marketers have reported good, although expensive, results from using the LinkedIn ad services. 

Most forum sites like Eng-tips don’t have a way for marketers to directly add content pieces, but they do typically sell paid eblasts.  We’ve found paid eblasts to be very effective for middle and bottom of funnel activities. 

We’ve also done some work on StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, etc.  Those may be worthy of another post someday.  Let me know.

John