Whether you are studying for your heavy vehicle licence or are already a heavy vehicle driver, you can often get invaluable advice from those already in the industry by participating in social media groups and pages. Bear in mind there will be a lot of opinionated people there, but if you ask sensible questions, most are very willing to help. Most\u00a0of the groups are closed groups where you need to apply to join because open groups attract a lot of spam. In this case it helps a lot if you have a picture of a truck or something heavy vehicle-related in your profile picture.<\/p>\n
You will find that people post if there are jobs available in their company, or if they are looking for work. Expect to see lots of pictures of trucks and videos involving trucks.<\/p>\n
Once you join a group, make sure you check out the rules so that you don’t get banned!<\/p>\n
Trucking New Zealand<\/a>:\u00a0Closed group currently with over 4400 members.<\/p>\n Truckies of NZ<\/a>: Closed group with over 5000 members specifically for truckers and transport operators, their families and friends.<\/p>\n Just ’bout Trucks<\/a>: Closed group with over 800 members that says it has truck pics, jokes, info and questions about the trucking community.<\/p>\n Magpies Truck Photos<\/a>: Closed group with over 3400 members<\/p>\n Truck Journal Show n Shine<\/a>: Closed group with over 3400 members for people to share pics of the new and shiny trucks on the road.<\/p>\n Bling Trucks in NZ<\/a>: Closed group with over 2300 members for photos of super shiny trucks with a lot of chrome.<\/p>\n Freightliner Trucks NZ<\/a>: Closed group with over 600 members, dedicated to Freightliner trucks.<\/p>\n Eyecatching Trucks<\/a>: Closed group with over 3000 members, similar to Bling Trucks in NZ (focusing on eye-catching trucks)<\/p>\n Truck Journal Classics<\/a>: Closed group with over 5500 members.\u00a0The aim of the\u00a0group is to remember the trucks of yesterday which had the wow\u00a0factor and to share your\u00a0memories.<\/p>\n STL Linehaul<\/a>: Closed group with over 1500 members run by the\u00a0STL Linehaul company.<\/p>\n Scania Trucks in New Zealand<\/a>: Public group dedicated to pictures and talk about Scania trucks.<\/p>\n Kenworth Trucks New Zealand<\/a>: Closed group with over 4000 members for photos of NZ-based Kenworth trucks at work.<\/p>\n Kenworth Trucks Aotearoa<\/a>: Closed group with over 3200 members, similar to the other Kenworth Facebook page.<\/p>\n Mack Trucks in NZ<\/a>: Closed group with over 3300 members, dedicated to Mack trucks in New Zealand<\/p>\n Heavy Haulage in New Zealand<\/a>: \u00a0Closed group with over 2700 members and only discusses heavy haulage.<\/p>\n NZ Low Loaders<\/a>: Public group with around a hundred members mainly showing pictures of low loader trailers and loads.<\/p>\n Self-steer Trailers of New Zealand<\/a>: Closed group with around 250 members for photos, comments and the history of self-steer trailers.<\/p>\n Milk Tankers and Stock Trucks New Zealand<\/a>: Closed group with over 1500 members. Just photos of and chat about milk tankers and stock trucks.<\/p>\n Logging Trucks of New Zealand<\/a>: Closed group with over 800 members solely dedicated to logging truck photos and talk.<\/p>\n A-Train Trailer Combos of NZ<\/a>: Public group with photos to depict a bygone era when A-trains roamed the NZ roads.<\/p>\n B-Trains of NZ, Old and New<\/a>: Closed group dedicated to B-trains of any age.<\/p>\n NZ Road Transport and Contracting Archives<\/a>: Public group with over 2000 members, dedicated to sharing photos of heavy machinery from road construction and contracting in NZ.<\/p>\n On linked in you can join groups, or you can follow companies.<\/p>\n NZ Trucking<\/a>: Fledgling group with only a few members<\/p>\n On Google+ you can follow a page and add it to your circles.<\/p>\n X Trucking<\/a>: mostly photos of fairly bling trucks. Doesn’t seem to be updated often.<\/p>\n Twitter is a more difficult place to navigate as you need to find people who are talking about trucks in New Zealand, and there aren’t many (ummm, read any<\/em>!) that we could find.<\/p>\n However, you can always search by hashtags to narrow down news about your favourite brand, e.g. searching #freightliner<\/a> will bring up all posts with the hashtag #freightliner.<\/p>\n Forums are less popular these days as most of the conversation as moved to Facebook, but there are a few survivors with a lot of members such as:<\/p>\nTruck brands<\/h3>\n
Specific types of truck or operation<\/h3>\n
LinkedIn<\/h2>\n
Google+<\/h2>\n
Twitter<\/h2>\n
Forums<\/h2>\n