Maritime firms don't sell on social media, and that is the point
Studied shipping firms post almost nothing that tries to sell. They use social media to build reputation, sustainability and employer brand, which is the work that pays in this market.
What a content analysis of shipping firms found
Šekularac-Ivošević and colleagues (2023), writing in STED Journal, examined how shipping firms actually use social media. The study is a content analysis comparing two firms across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the year 2021. One is A.P. Moller-Maersk, a container line operating at global scale. The other is Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a ship manager working in a more specialised corner of the market. The researchers coded the firms' posts into categories and counted how often each category appeared.
The headline result concerns what was largely absent. Shipping firms made essentially no direct-sales posts. For the ship manager, the category covering intention to buy and sales recorded zero posts across all three platforms. The content that dominated belonged to other categories entirely: corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and employee and employer brand management. Firms used their channels to describe their conduct, their environmental commitments, and their people.
The two firms also differ sharply in scale of investment. Maersk operated at roughly 3.05 million Facebook followers. The ship manager sat at around 12,000. That gap illustrates how differently firms in the same sector resource their digital presence, and it frames any comparison of their activity. The sample here is two companies, so the figures describe an indicative pattern, with the caution a small sample demands. They are worth reading as a signal about how the medium is used.
Why selling is the wrong job for the channel
The pattern fits the structure of the market the firms operate in. Shipping is a relationship-driven, long-cycle B2B business. Charters and management mandates are negotiated over months and renewed over years. Decisions involve charterers, owners, brokers and technical managers, each weighing reliability, safety record and reputation before commercial terms ever close. A purchase is not triggered by a post, and a platform that measured success by direct conversions would record almost nothing of value in this setting.
What the channels do instead is accumulate evidence. A consistent stream of posts about safety performance, decarbonisation progress, and the experience of crews builds a record that counterparties can observe over time. Corporate social responsibility content signals how a firm conducts itself. Sustainability content speaks to the regulatory and commercial pressure that now shapes chartering decisions. Employer brand content addresses the labour market for seafarers and shore staff, where reputation determines who a firm can recruit and retain. Each category does work that bears on commercial outcomes without ever asking for a sale.
This reframes what a social and digital presence is for in maritime. It functions as a reputation and trust engine. The audience is small, informed and durable, and it forms its judgement gradually from what a firm shows of itself. The studied firms appear to understand this, which is why their feeds read as records of conduct and capability.
What the pattern implies for firms that under-invest
The implication runs in one direction. A firm that treats social media as a sales channel misreads what the medium does in this sector. Counting clicks and direct conversions sets a target the channel was never built to hit, and judging the activity by that target leads to disinvestment in exactly the content that carries weight with charterers, owners and crews.
The value the studied firms extract comes from consistency and substance. Presence over time, on topics that matter to the people who make chartering and recruitment decisions, compounds into credibility. A firm that posts little, or posts only when it has something to promote, forfeits that accumulation. The reputation that competitors build steadily in public becomes a gap that is slow and expensive to close once a mandate is in play.
For an operator that has historically under-invested in marketing, the lesson sits in the data itself. The firms studied here spend their digital effort on reputation, sustainability and employer brand, and they spend essentially none of it trying to sell. The market rewards the former because that is the work the medium can do. A presence that is consistent, substantive and aimed at trust is the form of marketing that pays in shipping, and the absence of one is a cost that accrues quietly until it is needed.