Build Your Community to Grow Your Data Center
Data Centers don’t always make public outreach their primary concern, but there’s a lot to gain by making yourself available online. As B2B connections occur, a strong digital presence can establish your reputation. Even if an initial connection point isn’t made online, an online presence can build trust and deeper connections.
Even a light touch with social media can help data centers take on new business and position themselves for growth.
An Unspoken Connection
When your company’s work is tied to the internet, people will naturally expect your online presence to be important to you. As such you should have a robust online presence which will include a strong social media presence. To keep a strong presence you’ll need to find ways to craft materials to post on a regular basis. Many data centers struggle with finding a way to grow their presence and produce regular material. This article will give you tips on both of these objectives below.
An Organic Touch
Your first goal when starting on social media is straightforward. Build your audience. Simple use of hashtags and regular posting in a cadence of three times a week will be a great start to achieving this goal. Liking and following business associates and other partners will jump-start your presence. You can also use this list of 23 data center experts to follow, giving you another jump start to building your network.
Paid Social Media
To take advantage of the full benefit of social media, you may also want to consider paid ads. Paid social media is an excellent way to ensure that you are found by your audience and that you’ll always be top of mind since your ad will be shown to your demographic and ever-expanding audience. Though for ads to be effective, you can’t post a single campaign for a few weeks and call it good.
Your ads will require a budget and tweaking based on analytics over a long term duration. A single ad can be tweaked and kept up for years. Things to test might include your CTA (call to action) with something like ‘learn more’ or ‘discover more about colocation.’
Midas Touch
Looking to a best in class example, Stream Data Centers, received recognition in their community for their social media presence. Proving that if you invest in your presence, sometimes it pays off in unexpected ways.
A quick look through Stream Data Center’s feed will show the elements in their posts that you can incorporate to make your feed a success. Putting faces to the industry is a common practice that makes posts more engaging and humanizing in a world of data and black boxes. They use the same shade of blue along with their logo on a majority of their posts, so their ‘look and feel’ becomes more familiar to users over time and helps keep them top of mind. Their copy uses a few hashtags that make their post easier to find for those interested in the relevant topics.
Social Media Goals
Different teams will have different goals, resources, outputs, and results on social media. Some will be chasing direct sales, and some will be pushing brand recognition. Others will be driving the consideration of their brand over another brand once a potential customer has identified a particular need or solution. An example of this might be influencing a customer to choose one brand of IP KVM switch over another.
Great feeds will move past a single goal and ultimately be a presence for the industry within relevant channels. A company that stands out within the IT infrastructure industry is Green House Data. They have a top-notch team that puts out a steady stream of content that users are responding to every day.
They use a blend of blue and green to evoke a fresh and natural feeling. At the same time, they are focusing their copy on more technical matters. Ensuring their visuals evoke the impression that they’re green, saving energy, or are more natural. The pinned video posts you can see via their Twitter or Facebook are well crafted, allowing interested parties to learn more with minimal interaction.
You can also see them taking full advantage of their content with the establishment of their Youtube channel and RSS feed. This allows what was developed for other avenues to be accessed by even more people. If you are taking the time to put this level of content together, it’s well worth the time to repost it far and wide so more people will click on it.
Taking a look through their feeds, and the differences across them can also help you select which content is appropriate for each platform in the industry. You’ll see more curation on Linkedin, more shout outs and @s on Twitter, with a blend between those two on Facebook.
Be Social
One of the biggest mistakes made by professional social media account managers is forgetting the need to be social. Find relevant posts others have made, and leave a comment, a like, and share with your network.
By avoiding others’ voices within any given platform and not engaging with the wider community, you are only hurting yourself. For your presence online to be relevant to others, you need to uplift and engage with your community. Only sharing business-critical announcements is dull, and will never allow you to build a following.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to increase your outreach, social media is still one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective tactics available. With regular incremental gains, you’ll always be finding your next advocate, partner, or sale. Using these tips from this article, you can create a feed that will boost your data center’s brand awareness.
Do you have any thoughts about your data center’s presence on social media? Please reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and let us know.