Design World Facebook Fan Page

Industrial design engineers: become a friend of Design World Magazine on Facebook. I know the general rule is that your brand is nobody’s friend, but we’ve kept select posts flowing into the page and continue to grow our fan base here. I started keeping the magazine covers here in fairly high res and quick summaries on the magazine content monthly – and of course all that industrial news can be found online.

Looking at our Facebook fan base I can see how other publishers scratch their head wondering, why participate? The numbers are not real high, and it takes time to manage and the return may not be clear. From my perspective some portion of our audience and potential audience wants to engage through that medium, so let’s keep the barriers to participation low. And if I add up the audience numbers on LinkedIn, the Engineering Exchange, Twitter followers and Facebook, those numbers alone total close to 9,000 engineers and interested readers that want to connect, read, give feedback, and basically join the conversation with Design World. The key is joining and engaging versus just broadcasting alone.

I have noticed lately a lot of TV & magazine advertisers place URLs to “facebook.com/CompanyFanpage” versus their own domain. If it’s not completely obvious by now, marketers and publishers have figured out they need to engage an audience of industrial design engineers, and others, on their terms. But yet I still hear that no one uses social media in the engineering space – pure nonsense. Ask an engineer if they use ’social media’ and the answer is maybe no. Ask them if they have gone online for industrial news and read a blog, wrote a blog, use a Google or Yahoo page, visited a forum for help, gave help on a forum, or watched a You-Tube video and the answer is always yes. Always semantics…

I remember pushing to do a website for the first company I worked for out of college in 1995. The first response was “what’s a website”, and the second was how is this going to benefit the company. The good news was the benefit came quick measured by sales, but for many, the process took much too long. Fast forward and I get the “I kinda know what social media is, but how is this going to benefit my company?” Every company has their challenges, and we genuinely want to help, advise and pass on what we have learned to our customers; and the learning continues every day. For us at Design World the benefit of using social media is crystal clear, and the more we learn the more we can help. So become our friend on Facebook, join our Linkedin Group, connect on the Engineering Exchange, or follow us on Twitter or follow me and you’ll connect with more than a brand and receive more industrial news.