As the largest FPGA vendor, Xilinx is on top of it’s social media game by using multiple channels to talk with customers and listen. Browsing their Home page I quickly found an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) icon just below the rotating banner images, plus a link to their Blog.
RSS
Clicking the RSS link brings you to a page with a whopping 12 choices for RSS feeds based on interest:
Media Center
Press Releases (All)
Corporate Announcements
Event Announcements
Product Announcements
Media Kits
Xilinx In the News
Events
Webcasts and Video Library
Image Gallery
Management Team
Customer Innovation
The benefit of subscribing to an RSS feed with a service like Feedly is that I get notified when there’s new content, so I don’t have to browse dozens of web pages to discover if there’ s some news, event or blog.
Blogs
There’s an Xcell daily blog written by Steve Leibson that receives up to 500 views per article, based on the popularity of the topic. Steve has an engineering and EDA background, plus he was the technical editor at EDN Magazine. I admire any company that has the transparency to list the number of Views an article has.
Steve Leibson
The other active blogger at Xilinx is Austin with his PLD Blog, although it’s not updated daily like Steve’s blog, it’s more like monthly.
Austin
Forums
There’s a forum that requires registration to publish or comment, and they’ve got 34 top-level categories for you to choose. The top three forum categories are:
[TABLE] style=”width: 500px”
|-
| Forum
| Posts
|-
| Embedded Development Tools
| 28,642
|-
| Spartan Family FPGAs
| 22.073
|-
| Virtex Family FPGAs
| 16,466
|-
The company page for Xilinx on LinkedIn has some 24,729 followers, and you’ll see at most one update per week, so it’s not really active. They do have jobs, so the company continues to grow, which is always good news. There’s also a private Group with 2,320 members, which means that you have to request membership and be approved by the group manager.
Google+
This is just getting started for Xilinx, so just 473 people have added Xilinx to their Circles while 749 have clicked the +1. Companies that create a Google+ account have to decide if they will add people to their Circle, and Xilinx has added 62 people. You can expect to see up to 1-2 posts per week.
They use hashtags, something new in Google+ that started over on Twitter, making it easier to find the subject you’re most interested in.
With 8,522 followers of @XilinxInc you can expect up to 6 tweets per day. There’s more interaction on Twitter with retweets and mentions compared to their other social media channels.
Xilinx is using a variety of hashtags to help you sort out the interesting bits: #Xilinx, #Zynq, #MicroZed #Xcell #Programmable #FPGA #embedded #Virtex #Vivado #OpenCL.
For Japanese readers, try following @XilinxJapan.
I found that 10,747 people like this Page, and you can read up to three new posts per day, many with photos and links to longer articles.
It’s smart to always include a photo or video in all Facebook Posts in order to get visibility when followers read their stream.
At 2,973 subscribers this channel has an OK following. I thought it odd that they auto-play a video recapping 2012 instead of showing me something newer. There are several video categories:
- Featured Videos
- Vivado QuickTake Tutorials
- Zynq-7000 All Programable SoC Tutorials
- FPGA Design Training
- Embedded FPGA Design Training
- Xilinx in The News
- Playlists
Some of the most popular videos are:
Introduction to the Vivado Integrated Design Suite
- by XilinxInc .
- 6,421 views
- by XilinxInc .
- 1,677 views
What is the Difference Between an FPGA and an ASIC
- by XilinxInc .
- 2,354 views
Summary
For the highest interaction with Xilinx I would recommend their own community forums, followed by Twitter. They’ve got all the major social media channels covered.
I’d also expect to see Xilinx migrate their main web site to be mobile ready, so that we can enjoy browsing from our tablets or smart phones without having to pinch, scroll and zoom around so much. The forum web site is mobile ready already.
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