Even in 2026, many pallet companies still raise a basic question about social media: Is it worth the effort? The answer from four marketing professionals with direct pallet-industry experience is a definitive YES, but with an important qualification. Posting for the sake of posting is not a strategy. Social media works best when it is tied to larger goals: developing sales relationships, driving prospects to a useful website, recruiting employees, building local reputation, demonstrating expertise and staying visible until a customer has a reason to buy.
For this article, Pallet Enterprise spoke with Jennifer Daniels, who is an independent marketing consultant; Jesse Viola, CEO of Digital Native and president of APM, a pallet recycling and packaging provider; Josh Lee, owner of Decoy Marketing & Consulting and marketing consultant to Edwards Wood Products; and Mitch Woolley, founder and CEO of E-Marketing Associates and its Pallet Company Marketing division, which provides digital marketing services to pallet manufacturers throughout the United States.
Their answers differed in emphasis, but several themes kept resurfacing: LinkedIn matters, authentic content beats generic advertising, consistency matters more than perfection, and social media should not be viewed in isolation from the rest of the sales and marketing process.
Start With the Audience, Not the Platform
Asked which platform pallet companies should concentrate on, Viola did not hesitate.
“LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn,” he said. “It’s not just defense; it’s offense too. It gives you the ability to search your potential customer base. It’s one of the best B2B databases in the world, if not the best B2B database in the world, and you can reach out to people who are buying what you sell. If you’ve got the money, sure, you should run ads across Meta. You should do Google listings. But if you’re going to do one thing, get on LinkedIn.”
Daniels also put LinkedIn first for B2B relationship building and lead development, but she stressed that different platforms do different jobs. Facebook can help build local identity, celebrate employees and support recruiting. YouTube can support more detailed educational material and help move people toward the company website.
During her PalletOne years, PalletOne maintained a Facebook page for each location, allowing corporate material to flow to every page while individual plants could still post local news. That provided both message consistency and a local presence.
Woolley similarly emphasizes LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn keeps a pallet manufacturer visible to purchasing, warehouse, logistics and operations professionals. Facebook can be useful for company culture, recruiting and community visibility. His larger point is that a purchasing manager does not need to be shopping for pallets when the post appears. Repeated exposure to a company’s people, equipment and capabilities builds familiarity before the buying need arrives.
Lee is taking a phased approach with Edwards Wood Products. Before starting social media campaigns, it was important to update the company website, which would be the basis of the social media campaign. LinkedIn came next, with content aimed at specific groups such as procurement contacts and pallet lumber buyers instead of generic posting. YouTube followed because long-form educational content can answer questions in greater depth. X can handle more immediate industry commentary, while Facebook and Instagram can play a stronger role in culture, community, and recruiting.
A pallet company does not have one social media audience. Procurement managers, prospective employees, local residents, landowners, and pallet buyers may require different messages and platforms.
What Content Actually Works?
The experts were equally consistent about what not to do. A steady stream of “We sell pallets, call us today” messages will not hold attention.
“The best content is usually content that shows the real business rather than simply trying to sell pallets,” Woolley said. “People like seeing behind the scenes. Photos and short videos of the manufacturing process, automated equipment, lumber coming into the facility, pallets being built, custom pallet projects, trucks being loaded, recycling operations and employees at work can all perform well.”
Woolley also recommends educational content based on questions customers actually ask. A pallet manufacturer can explain differences between new and recycled pallets, the importance of specifications, factors affecting price or how recycling programs work. The company can also publish information useful to warehouse managers and operations professionals even when the subject is not directly about pallets.
Educational content can also boost your exposure as companies conduct research via AI chat and other tools. Woolley explained, “This type of educational content is becoming increasingly important for AI visibility as well as traditional SEO. By publishing useful resources that answer the questions warehouse managers, supply chain professionals, and other potential customers are actually asking, pallet companies can build authority while increasing their opportunities to be discovered through both traditional search and AI-powered search experiences.”
This may be especially true as companies think beyond traditional Google rankings to how AI-powered search is changing the way people research topics online. Beyond just being a resource on pallets, you can also provide content to those who may be customers one day. Woolley suggested, “Someone searching for information about becoming a better warehouse manager may not need pallets today, but helpful content introduces that person to the pallet company and begins building familiarity and credibility long before a buying need arises.”
Viola believes personal-brand content can be especially powerful when the person creating it is genuinely comfortable doing it. “If you have that personality, and you have that joie de vivre for life, and you are a pumped-up individual, you should get on your phone and talk into it and just document what you’re doing and how you’re doing it because you’re passionate about it,” he said.
“But it’s got to be real. It’s got to be authentic,” he continued. If you’re just trying to come up with the next marketing hack, I would say don’t do that.”
Daniels offered perhaps the best illustration of how unpredictable engagement can be. At one PalletOne location, employees found a lost dog and posted about it on Facebook. The post took off locally, adding roughly 200 followers.
“It was comical what did it,” she recalled, but the result illustrated a serious point. The Facebook page had become part of the community. That local following later had practical value when the plant needed employees because jobs could be promoted directly to a receptive local audience.
Daniels also sees pricing as well as regulatory and technical information as especially valuable because useful content can establish expertise over time. During earlier changes involving shipments to China, Daniels worked with salespeople to help customers understand what they needed to do to move compliant pallets into that market.
“Those customers that we helped in those periods stayed with us through my entire tenure, or 20-plus years, literally,” she said. “Just things like regulatory issues and trying to be in the customer’s head: What do they need to know? Not just what do they need to know right now. What do they need to know is coming, so that they can start planning properly?”
Good social content can become customer service delivered before the customer asks for it.
From Likes to the Sales Funnel
Measuring social media is more complicated than keeping track of “likes.” Daniels sees social media as an early entry point into the sales funnel. Someone may read a post and not surface in the company CRM until months later.
During COVID, for example, PalletOne regularly communicated market and pricing information. Salespeople later heard from prospects and customers who remembered those updates. The post did not necessarily create a quotation request, but it helped establish credibility.
Woolley makes a similar argument. A prospect might encounter a company on social media, read an educational article, visit its website, see the company again on LinkedIn and only later make contact. His firm therefore tracks website traffic, form submissions, phone calls and inquiries where possible rather than judging a post solely on visible engagement.
Lee described likes as a vanity metric when they cannot be connected to meaningful website engagement, conversations or pipeline activity. Edwards is only beginning its new social strategy, so he was careful not to claim results that do not yet exist. What has already produced leads, he said, is the company’s new website. Social media is being built to feed and reinforce that larger system.
Viola’s view is even more sales-system oriented. Social media, he argued, is only one component of a digital selling process.
“The real truth is that what you need is a sales system that works digitally,” Viola said. “Pallet companies and packaging companies need a system that starts from prospecting and goes all the way to closing, and then touches ongoing customer communications. That is what everybody needs. I believe that is way beyond marketing trends. That’s just what has always happened. It just now needs to be digitized.”
He offered a familiar pallet-industry scenario. A prospect asks for pricing on several loads per week and then disappears for six months. If the information and follow-up live only in a salesperson’s memory or notebook, the opportunity may disappear. In a disciplined digital system, the relationship can continue until circumstances change. A dormant lead can eventually become a major account.
Viola added that repeatable sales systems may also make a company more valuable to a future buyer than one where decades of relationships exist primarily inside the owner’s head.
Consistency Beats Polish
It is not uncommon to scroll someone’s posting history and see regular posts or even flurries of posts over a period of days or weeks, and then nothing for months and months. Sometimes the benefits of social media are not immediately evident. Some people lose momentum and stop doing it after a few months. Or they only post intermittently.
All the experts seemed to agree on one thing – consistency matters more than anything. Daniels summed it up, “Consistency beats polish.”
She readily admits that producing social media can consume considerable time. Holiday posts, employee news, operational content, regulatory updates and sales-oriented material all compete for attention. The solution is getting more of the organization involved.
“The biggest challenge is really getting salespeople and operations people and HR people to understand its value and participate,” Daniels said. “Content is hard to create on your own, but if you have an operations person or a plant manager sending you a picture from their safety meeting or sending you photos from their luncheon, that stuff is gold. Most content managers don’t need a lot of information. They just need a photo.”
Woolley recommends the same basic process. Employees already know what is happening in the plant, what customers are asking, what equipment has arrived and what unusual projects are underway. The marketing function can turn that raw material into useful content. A smartphone photo or short video collected during the normal workday is often enough.
Lee is much more aggressive about frequency. He argues that social media has evolved into “interest media,” where users increasingly see material selected around demonstrated interests rather than simply chronological updates from people or companies they follow.
“There is no magic bullet,” Lee said. “I have watched teams suffer from what I call analysis paralysis, spending hours and days to publish one single post that gets almost zero engagement, and I’ve watched something that was dashed off in five minutes outperform it by a wide margin. Social doesn’t have to reward perfection; it rewards consistency.”
His ideal posting volume can be far higher than most pallet companies would contemplate. But his practical advice is simpler: one post a week is better than none, three are better than one, and the company should increase activity as its bandwidth allows.
AI: Force Multiplier, Not Substitute
Generative AI makes producing content easier, including generic content. Daniels finds AI particularly useful for the blank-page problem and for extending a good idea. Feed it a successful post and ask for five other angles, she suggested, and it can compress what might once have required a roomful of people brainstorming into seconds. The challenge is that competitors now have the same capability. As polished AI graphics become commonplace, simply producing slick material will not distinguish a company.
Her answer is to get closer to the customer. Salespeople hear the actual questions, problems and worries customers express. A mold-related post timed to mold season, for example, may prompt a customer to respond, “We were just having that exact issue.”
Woolley draws a similar boundary around AI. It can brainstorm topics, organize material, develop variations and improve efficiency, but it cannot walk through the plant or understand what makes one pallet operation different from another. The strongest content combines AI efficiency with actual industry knowledge and genuine company stories.
Viola urges companies to experiment with AI and become comfortable treating it as an executive assistant, but he also cautions against “getting obsessed with the tools and the toys.” The objective is not to build a 100% AI-run pallet company. It is to use technology to free people for more valuable work.
Lee calls AI a force multiplier. Decoy uses it for ideation, analysis, targeting and workflow automation, but he argues that the underlying tools are becoming broadly available. The differentiator will increasingly be the people who know how to apply them to a real business strategy.
Tell the Story Only You Can Tell
That brings the discussion back to the company’s own story. Lee pointed to Edwards Wood Products, which grew from a business that started in a chicken house in Marshville, North Carolina, to an organization employing more than 850 people. Pallet companies sometimes assume they are too industrial or too B2B to be interesting. He believes that is a serious mistake.
Woolley likewise recommends showing the actual operation and becoming genuinely useful to the people a company wants to reach. Daniels stresses listening to sales, operations and HR so content reflects what customers, workers and communities actually care about. Viola argues that the digital tools may be new, but the underlying task is familiar: create conversations and relationships systematically.
For pallet companies wondering where to begin, these experts point to a practical formula. Start with LinkedIn for B2B visibility. Use Facebook where community and recruiting matter. Create useful, authentic material from inside the business. Get employees involved in supplying photos, questions and stories. Connect social media to the website, CRM and sales process. Use AI to speed the work, not replace judgment. Then keep showing up.
The goal is not necessarily to go viral. As Woolley put it, “Having 50 of the right people see your content can be much more valuable than having 5,000 people who will never purchase a pallet see it.”
