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Automotive Suppliers: Don’t Overlook Your Most Powerful Social Media Platform

Most automotive suppliers are not leveraging the incredible reach and power of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with 350+ million members (and adding two more across 200 countries and territories per second).

While LinkedIn is viewed as the most important social network for business people – ahead of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ – most automotive suppliers are using their other social media platforms more often. This is a major misstep since, for the top auto suppliers, LinkedIn is the social channel where they typically have the largest following of customers, prospects, employees, suppliers, potential recruits and other important audiences.

Yet, LinkedIn accounts for less than one-quarter of all auto supplier posts across their top four social networks. 

Our 2015 Social Media and Automotive Supplier Habits 2.0™ (SMaASH 2.0™) study of the top 25 North American automotive OEM suppliers (as ranked by Automotive News) showed that the typical supplier had an average LinkedIn following of more than 111,000 people – almost double its Facebook following and more than 13 times its Twitter following.

Yet, the average top 25 auto supplier is using LinkedIn 50 percent less than they use Twitter for updates. But here’s some good news: there’s a great opportunity for improvement! To optimize and energize your company’s largest social media following, focus more of your posts on LinkedIn.

Here are some tips to help you get started:

1) Lay out a calendar for social media posts and build a backlog of evergreen posts that you can draw from when your creative well runs dry. Here are some template to help get your started: http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-templates/;
2) Solicit help and contributions from the experts within your company who are writing technical papers, giving presentations and making news;
3) Salute, congratulate or profile your best customers or suppliers;
4) Connect your LinkedIn presence to your other social media platforms and cross-promote your channels by customizing your message to fit each channel’s format; and
5) Mix up your posts. Make some educational (think: issues, trends); some inspirational (think: quotes); some local involvement (think: community); some personal (think: your best people behind the scenes); as well as some news and promotional.

Posting regularly and frequently on LinkedIn helps your company:

1) Tap into and extend your largest social media network – a group that shares your interests;
2) Build awareness and relationships through special interest groups and conversations; and
3) Demonstrate industry leadership by sharing pertinent presentations, white papers, infographics and viewpoints.

Ultimately, if you want to harness the power of the most important social network for business, focus on sharing your interesting content on your company’s LinkedIn page more often.