IN a day and age where the internet is as much a part of our daily lives as food, it`s crucial for every business to have an on-line presence.
The mining industry is using digital marketing strategies, including social media, to attract community support, talent and media attention, not only to communicate technical aspects of their projects reactively, but pro-actively as well.
Over the past few years, access to information has changed the way the mining business communicates and interacts with their audience.
Mining companies in Australia are using stories that connect people and businesses to create a positive agenda for their brand.
If you go to Youtube or any other social media platform and browse in any of the channels of the biggest mining companies in Australia, you will notice that in the past five years the companies are showing less of the operations or technical aspects and telling more personal stories.
Topics about the environment, flexible working policies, gender gap and inclusions are some of the issues that have more content about.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you are in Australia and search on Google for the word “Adani”, the link in the first position will be the website Stop Adani.
This is the worst SEO scenario that you can imagine from the digital marketing perspective.
But, why is Stop Adani ranking higher than Adani Australia itself? There are many ranking factors that Google takes into consideration, but the one that is making some difference, in this case, is the quality of backlinks of each website connected to, and the organic traffic for, this specific search term.
Because of the media coverage about the protest, the Stop Adani`s website received a significant amount of high-quality domain backlinks, which shows Google that this website is relevant for those searching for Adani.
Public relations and social media combined
According to Media Shark on-line content head Gabriela Damaceno, governments and communities are undoubtedly changing the mining industry dynamics, and some companies already understand that it is a better way to engage with them.
“With the democratisation of the information seen in the last decades on social media, both governments and communities have the power even to shut down projects if their needs are not adequately assessed,” she said.
Browsing between the recent press releases and digital marketing campaigns of the most significant mining companies in Australia, it is clear to see that public relations and social media are working together to create a positive agenda.
“They are using these channels to talk about how their actions are impacting the community and employees,” Ms Damaceno said.
“Public relations and social media campaigns are not two totally different communication tools as they used to be a few years ago.”
