The fact that you’re reading this tells me you know something about social media. Otherwise, why would you be reading a blog?

At Pointwise we’re trying to make the best use of social media to share information with people worldwide who are interested in CFD and mesh generation. In general, we view social media as a convenient method of engaging people in a conversation. At the top of this web page you’ll find a resource page of other companies and people using social media for CFD.

We have also seen a few technical support issues raised on Facebook and Twitter as opposed to conventional support forums like email or our website. Times they are a-changin’, especially for those of us who can remember when email was new.

The challenge with social media is figuring out which channel to use and how best to use it. There are also the obvious issues with how specific social channels are optimized for specific types of content – text, image, video.

Let’s face it – Facebook is not the Journal of Computational Physics so we’re not going to use it as such. Twitter only gives you 140 characters to work with so mostly you’re going to get a link to something.

So what exactly are we using these social media platforms for?

Pinterest is the most recent addition to Pointwise’s social media portfolio. You’ll find there a collection of pictures from our newsletter, grids we’ve generated, and other imagery. www.pinterest.com/pointwise

On LinkedIn we post articles about upcoming events like training courses and webinars. We also mirror posts from our blog. www.linkedin.com/company/pointwise-inc.

We use Facebook as a forum to share a more personal look at what’s going on here at Pointwise with updates about our people, places they visit, and people who visit us. www.facebook.com/pointwise

Pointwise and some of our staff are very active on Twitter. Not only do we post about the usual things – conferences, courses, software releases – but we also share and retweet interesting news from the CAE world. We try to participate in the weekly #SimulationFriday event in which people from around the globe post images of simulations in work or recently completed. twitter.com/pointwise

You obviously already know about our blog, Another Fine Mesh. Here we try to post articles, some long, some short, about interesting topics in CFD. These posts can include notes about our products, summaries of conferences we attend, news items, and the results of interesting projects we have going on. Each week we write a post called This Week in CFD in which you can find summaries and commentary on notable news items from around the CAE industry. blog.pointwise.com

YouTube is our home for video content ranging from recordings of our webinars, demonstrations of how to build meshes, and quick “how-to” style instructions. www.youtube.com/user/CFDMeshing

While not strictly a social medium, we turned the Y+ Calculator on our website into an app for iOS and Android mobile devices. Remember all those times you were out on the town and wanted to compute wall spacing to achieve a desired y+? There’s an app for that. www.pointwise.com/yplus

You might call this social meshing. We use GitHub to host our Glyph Script Exchange where you can find Glyph scripts that make Pointwise do things it wasn’t designed to do. This includes macros, templates, command extensions, and sometimes just toys.  pointwise.github.io

The Connector is our email newsletter. Every other month you get an issue with product news, application stories, and related content. We also use The Connector to announce product updates and events. www.pointwise.com/theconnector

We’d like to learn what you think about the intersection of CFD and social media. Maybe you have tips on other social channels we should consider.

• We hear that Google+ is becoming more and more popular. Should we use it?
• Should we expand our use of GitHub? We have ideas for other content we can share.
• Is there something up-and-coming that we should evaluate?

Join the conversation by emailing blog@pointwise.com or commenting on this post.