If you work in the ultra-competitive network infrastructure industry, social media can take a back seat. Yet strong social media strategies, while they may seem insignificant compared to other business tactics, can yield positive outcomes – even for network enterprises. Digital transformation, intensified by the rise of working from home, has only increased the need for network enterprises to be ever-present on social channels.
Improving your social media practices may require a small time investment, but there are rewards to be reaped in doing so.
Why should network brands engage on social media?
Online engagement has multiple benefits. It can help you to:
- Engage directly with both customers and potential customers.Today’s connected consumers increasingly expect businesses to engage with them across every available digital channel. In fact, research shows 51% of customers say they will become more loyal to telecom companies when they have good experiences.
- Drive more traffic to your website and the content on it. When a new piece of content is uploaded to the resource centre, it’s a good idea to share not just on one platform, but across as many social channels as you can. Remember that more exposure = more engagement = more click-throughs to your website. Additionally, be sure to repost existing content where you can to increase the mileage of your assets.
- Measure what matters. The analytics offered by LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more are invaluable to see which types of posts are doing well, which type of content help receive Facebook leads which pieces of content are getting clicked on the most, and whether your target audience is engaging with your messaging. Examples include engagement rate, click-through rate, impressions, and many more. These not only help you to optimise your feed, but also to hone your content according to your audience’s tastes.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here are some examples of network enterprises that are killing it on social media at the moment.
Arista – Content, content everywhere
Arista distributes its content simultaneously across all of its social media channels, giving each piece as much airtime as possible. This will have clear benefits for clicks and content engagement, not to mention the increased traffic to their website.
Even though it’s important to streamline your posts to its own social media platform (for example, Twitter’s word count differs a great deal from other channels), it’s great to give newly published content as much visibility as possible. Remember, different people will follow different channels, so any new person viewing this content is another potential click.
Signature move: Arista chooses carefully targeted hashtags to match the content they are uploading. For their blog ‘The Next Frontier in AI Networking’, rather than choosing generalised telecoms hashtags, they’ve opted for #AI, #artificialintelligence, #networking, and #computing. This all helps to ensure they are part of relevant conversations and engage more with the kinds of readers interested in the topic.
Aruba – A crowd-pleaser
Like Arista, Aruba loves posting new content and posts across all platforms. And they’re a blue-tick testament to the success of this approach. Whether that’s posting polls, encouraging followers to use their bespoke hashtags, e.g. #APsInTheWild, or embedding highly engaging videos to explain difficult network infrastructure concepts, their feed is both diverse and consistent.
By deploying multi-form posts with an emphasis on audience participation, they not only drive engagement to shoot their way up the algorithm, but they also keep their subscribers entertained.
Signature move: Aruba’s YouTube channel has visually engaging solution explanations that are easily shareable across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Video is proven time and time again to be a gold ticket for social media engagement, so they’ve got their strategy nailed. The added bonus of these videos is that they clarify their solutions for potential prospects.
Ciena – Hyping up their heroes
Ciena’s social media is all about their team, with real faces populating their feeds. As well as visually documenting successes such as building new network infrastructure or charity trips, they also celebrate the recognised work of their senior leaders, including photos. This is a wonderful approach as it demonstrates the company’s pride in its people, as well as transforming itself from a nameless entity into a collection of individuals that care about their work.
Like Aruba, Ciena also has its own YouTube series, catchily named “Chalk Talks”, discussing the future of the industry and up and coming technologies. This positions them as expert industry thought leaders, a crucial strategy for prospects to trust your expertise and your solutions.
Signature move: Both on LinkedIn and Instagram, “Life at Ciena” is documented. Instagram is an underrated platform for B2B businesses – yet Instagram saw a year-on-year increase of nearly 30% in B2B marketing usage in 2021. This hits another key business goal for which social media is often under-utilised – attracting and recruiting new top talent. It also adds to the overall impression of the brand being personable and unafraid of having fun.
Cisco – Lifestyle lovers
Despite being a hardy networking hardware, software, and telecommunications brand, Cisco isn’t afraid to get down with the people on its social media channels. Whether they’re recommending books to read, chewing over athleisure attire, or playing on mobile texting graphic tropes, Cisco cleverly roots their discussions in the issues of the real-life and the day-to-day. It’s a creative and interesting way to demonstrate a business need to decision makers.
Signature move: Cisco stays on top of current events. Their recent posts take up discourse on anything between SuperBowl, Valentines Day, and Children’s Mental Health. By participating in the conversation, they’re always staying relevant.
Palo Alto Networks – Brilliant branding
Whilst Cisco are exploring different lifestyle topics and visual hooks to tell their story, Palo Alto Networks are getting creative in a different way. Despite diversifying their content mediums – including blogs, banners, videos, and more, their striking orange branding remains consistent throughout – a hard thing to maintain on social media It makes their messages memorable and helps them to stand out.
Signature move: If their bold orange doesn’t say enough about their brand, their pace is equally fiery. Palo Alto posts across their channels on an almost daily basis, supplying their content consistently to keep their message fresh in their audience’s minds.
While we’ve cherry-picked some of the top techniques used by network brands on social media channels, they all use combinations of many of these tactics to generate success on social media. It’s clear to see that consistent posting, relevant messaging, and diversifying your content mediums are key to boosting those all-important engagement metrics. Rather than buying followers (expensive, easily noticeable), engaging and entertaining your target audience will ensure they are more likely to become buyers.
If you would like to find out more about how Isoline can help grow your audience and boost engagement on social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, get in touch at: hello@isolinecomms.com.
