Free Report: B2B Industry Spotlight on Industrial Technology

Clearly, despite being dwarfed by the chatter around large business-to-consumer companies, the public are still vocalizing their opinions and ideas surrounding industrial tech.

Although industrial technology companies will rarely be trending on Twitter, there’s still an opportunity for them on social, whether it’s in managing public relations, performing market research, tracking competitors or simply nurturing an online following.

---

Understanding the industrial social landscape

Within the B2B landscape, industrial technology is a relatively small conversation topic.

For the ten industries analyzed, conversation around industrial technology only maintains around 1% of the total discussion. Meanwhile, business software was the most discussed B2B sector, amassing 54% of all B2B directed chatter.

While the industry is gaining traction, it is clearly very young on social media – those with social accounts average 2,269 Twitter followers and 7,012 Facebook followers.

The Brandwatch analysis reveals that industrial technology companies maintain around 24% of the industry’s Twitter conversation, while audiences account for the remaining 76%.

While industrial tech brands are active on social, they enjoy far fewer replies and retweets than most other B2B industries.

Yet these businesses still tweet regularly. The outcome, as seen in the breakdown of brand and audience activity above, is that while both brands and audiences are active, there is less interaction between them.

Industrial tech businesses would be suited to respond to their online audiences more often

Within the 12-month timeframe analyzed, businesses only responded to 1.9% of the @mentions directed at them. There’s undoubtedly an opportunity for these businesses to do better at responding to their audiences – doing so appropriately will promote that brand’s reputation.

Yet B2B brands should understand that social media can be more useful than merely nurturing online audiences.

The report goes on to compare the sentiment surrounding B2B businesses in general against that of just industrial tech businesses.

Notably, the analysis reveals that the perception of industrial tech businesses is generally more positive than the average B2B industry.

While that’s a good sign, and hopefully suggests there are no public relations crises on the horizon, the same may not be true for individual businesses.

---

Digging deeper

More granular analysis of individual businesses can expose in detail how the general public opines about a brand and its competitors.

Comparing the sentiment surrounding individual competitors will provide a quick gauge of the industry landscape, but social media intelligence can be used to learn more about market trends, identify valuable insights and track important influencers.

Although industrial tech brands are only the target of 1% of the conversation surrounding B2B brands, the wealth of other publicly available data as well as the 196,000 online mentions they receive each year will still offer actionable insights.

For more insights on social media in the industrial technology, download the report.

---