20+ Industrial Maintenance Training Resources

20+ Industrial Maintenance Training Resources

With the ongoing concern about our nation’s skills gap, the option for choosing an education to pursue a vocational career is certainly an attractive one. With plentiful skilled labor jobs to fill, trade jobs pay very well (sometimes better than four-year college degrees) and don’t saddle students with hefty student loans.

In an article from SJVC, a private career college, they discuss more than 20 resources for maintenance training. With a variety of resources, you can expand your knowledge about the industrial market and explore your career options.

General Resources and Publications

Sometimes the best place to learn more is by reading more about it. By reading publications that correspond with the industrial market, you can learn more about what’s happening in the industry and about tips and tricks.

Video Series

Watching videos is a great way to do online training and gives insights on the daily work a maintenance worker might be doing. You may also expand your knowledge by watching training videos that can allow you to get an overview of the job and the tools you would be using.

Podcasts

Podcasts offer crucial information from someone who works in the career firsthand. Putting on a podcast is a great way to hear day-in-the-life reporting and an easy way to listen to tips.

Social Media

Social media is a valuable place to get recommendations, learn industry news and see insight into the career you want to enter. Social media can also help you look at a specific company and show you what they do in a day.

Check out the article from SJVC to see further in depth about each of these training resources.

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Why Have Social Media Policies?

Why Have Social Media Policies?

By Kaylee Lauriel, PR Intern

The prominence of social media and the presence of a cellphone in everyone’s pockets means many things, two of which being that nothing is private, and your company needs a strong social media policy.

There are eight components to a firm social media policy:

Purpose

Your company needs to understand why the policy is being created to govern social media, and what it will means for your company’s social media going forward.

Definition

Clearly define what your company will classify as social media, the specific platforms, and how the company will use the platforms. Your HR department will also include a clearly defined cellphone use policy, as many companies prohibit the personal use of social media during company time.

Users

Establish who in the company will be authorized to contribute, engage with and respond to social media, and who will be monitoring their activities. Appoint a company photographer to oversee taking photos to post.

Ownership

Decide who is in charge of creating and selecting content with guidelines and schedules for posting. This person, or people, will handle any photo or video release forms.

Content

Plainly define the type of information that can and cannot be shared.

Employee Conduct

Create a code of conduct for employees to adhere to in order to prevent them from accidentally commenting about the company or a situation without the company’s knowledge, control and explicit consent.

Communication Risks

Establish guidelines, both general and specific, and best practices for the use of different social media platforms. Make sure to touch on copyright material, any trademarks, imagery guidelines and a list of topics that should never be posted.

Negative Comments Protocol

Make sure there is a well-defined protocol on how to handle a customer’s negative posts or comments, such as when to acknowledge them, when to delete them and how to handle potential threatening posts or comments. Marketing and human resources both must be involved and have a plan of action to minimize the impact of negative posts and comments. The more likes, shares, tags and attention the post gets, the more the narrative spins out of control.

Strong social media policies set expectations and parameters for potential situations that could harm a company’s reputation. Company success relies on the right social media engagement, so make it easy with a good social media policy.

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Are Hashtags Still Relevant in 2024?

Are Hashtags Still Relevant in 2024?

By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician

The first ever hashtag was used in 2007, almost 17 years ago and since then hashtags have become a crucial part of social media. But with hashtags being 17 years old, are they still relevant to use? In this blog post, we will discuss whether your company should use hashtags and their importance.

The short answer is yes, hashtags are still relevant to use, but it’s vital to understand the benefits they possess.

Graphic of cartoon man with laptop sitting atop a hashtag with social media flags

Reaching potential customers

Hashtags allow for your target audience to find your brand by searching for appropriate hashtags. Searching and following specific hashtags allow for users to find your posts, which can help to grow your following and get potential new business. When using hashtags, make sure you’re using hashtags that are specific to your brand. This means that the people searching for these hashtags will be a more interested and engaged audience.

Social listening

Custom hashtags help to create a more well-rounded marketing strategy. By making something unique and specific to you and your brand, you can generate user-generated content when your customers use that hashtag. Hashtags also can give insight to customer behavior and help brands understand your audience better. Social listening tools can help you track hashtags related to your brand or products to identify the positive and negative conversations from your customers.

By social listening, you can also track relevant influencers within your niche that you could send products to.

Increasing organic reach

Using hashtags can increase your organic reach on social media platforms. As previously mentioned, hashtags help your content be seen from potential customers. Social media algorithms can also work to your advantage when using hashtags. The algorithm looks at every piece of content posted to the platform in order to prioritize the content to its users based on if it’s appealing or interesting. This includes looking at hashtags, the engagement of the post, caption and if it’s a photo or video.

If you still are not using hashtags to your advantage, then now is the time! You don’t want to miss out on potential customers that are easy to reach. Using hashtags correctly can play a key role in your marketing strategy and social media content. We don’t see hashtags going anywhere anytime soon, so make sure to incorporate them into your plan.

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Effective Marketing Tactics

Effective Marketing Tactics

By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician

Social media is an effective marketing tool for businesses to use to target their customers.

It’s not surprising that in a recent study from Wpromote in partnership with Ascend2, six in 10 respondents surveyed ranked social media as the most effective digital marketing channel at driving revenue. This is up from 50 percent last year and 57 percent the year before.

Social is the top revenue-driving channel and contributes the most to achieving top-of-funnel goals. Social is becoming a true full-funnel powerhouse for B2B marketers; in the past, marketers were more likely to use social platforms to drive brand awareness in the upper funnel, but this year, it topped the list of most effective bottom funnel channels for the first time. This is driven by the digital transformation that accelerated through the pandemic.

Brand awareness strategies are at the top of the funnel and are a critical focus for B2B brands. Next up was content marketing (49 percent), followed by email (45 percent), display advertising (36 percent) and paid search (32 percent).

Since the pandemic, social media has digitally transformed and continues to keep B2B buyers in mind by prioritizing their experience across different apps.

Social media is poised for budget growth: 56 percent say their social media budgets will increase this year, making this the area with the most consensus around budget growth. It’s followed by content marketing (52 percent), with fewer (34 percent) expecting to spend more on streaming TV.

To get the most out of budgets, whether you’re increasing by a lot, a little, or not at all, make sure to monitor your performance and move dollars between channels to follow demand.

Download the study here.

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Influencers on the Rise

Influencers on the Rise

By Kaylee Lauriel, PR Intern

In a world where fashion and lifestyle influencers are in abundance, trade influencers are not to be discounted. One of the most popular trade influencers on TikTok, a pool cleaner with the handle @thep00lguy, makes over $14,000 per post and almost $1.3 million a year with sponsorship deals. TikTok influencers are gaining traction and making money, with the possibility of making up to one million dollars a year, and here is why:

Influencers are a very enticing marketing prospect for big brands and companies. Sponsorship opportunities are endless between influencer and brands, shown by @thep00lguy who has capitalized on his niche content to get deals with multiple brands. These sponsorship deals are a chance to get brands noticed and content creators some extra money. Companies can partner with influencers on TikTok to promote their brand by giving them free products to use and advertise for their followers.

TikTok sees many tradesmen influencers. The most popular are automotive and plumbing. One of the most popular trade influencers, with 1.5 million followers, is Sydney Sweeney from the hit TV show Euphoria. Sweeney collects and restores rare vintage cars and documents her progress on TikTok, amassing hundreds of thousands of likes.

The reason influencers on TikTok see more success on this app as opposed to ones like Instagram or Twitter is because of TikTok’s algorithm. It is organic and based on user-generated content, not follower based, meaning that it collects information on what you enjoy and commonly watch and promotes more videos like that on your feed. Instagram and Twitter are more focused on follower content, so if you are not following people who routinely post about the trades, you are not likely to see that content.

Viewers liked being entertained and taught, something that is easy to do when you have a passion, be it your job or a hobby, which is uncommon as some of the trades are. People with no connection to the trades will see videos from trade influencers and, since it is not something they see in their daily life, they will want to learn more.

The Internet is also a place for DIY hacks and learning how to fix things yourself. Trade influencers is how you learn. As long as people have cars that get old and houses that need repairs, trade influencers will be in demand. A big part of social media strategies for influencers are tutorials and how-tos for this exact reason. When things go wrong, people go to the Internet for answers and solutions.

Another factor for the traction that tradesmen influencers have found could originate in part due to the COVID pandemic. During the nation-wide quarantine in 2020, the emergence of niche interests became important just as a way to stay sane. People picked up hobbies, some of them in the trade sector, to keep busy in a time when they could not go about their daily life as usual.

The rise of trade influencers has been a steady, yet undeniable incline. Whether their purpose is entertainment, education or to inform, tradesmen have found a way for their message to be shared by social media and an audience to listen to it. For as long as there are buildings and roads and electricity and more, there will be trade influencers to teach us about them.

To learn more about user-generated content, check out this blog post and see why you should take advantage of it. 

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