The pressure on water resources as a result of the socioeconomic system has caused more attention to be paid to the consumption of water resources and the indirect consumption of intermediate inputs; the mitigation of pressure on water resources and its key transmission sector has been less explored. This paper, which is based on water-expanded input–output data from 2002, 2007, and 2012 in Beijing, identifies the key transmission sector for water consumption and its annual dynamic changes with a Betweenness-based method and analyzes specific categories of features of industrial water resource consumption by using a method with hierarchical clustering and typology. The results show that there are significant differences in the water consumption rankings measured with the Betweenness-based method and other traditional input–output indexes. The Betweenness method provides additional information on the key transmission sectors of water use that were unobservable with traditional metrics. Furthermore, the sectors with high betweenness-based water consumption changed from traditional heavy industries, such as the mining sector and paper printing, to the modern manufacturing industries, which were dominated by the communication, automobile, electronics, and high-technology service industries and were led by commercial, research and development, and information services from 2002 to 2012. Finally, the results of hierarchical clustering and typology method showed that the sectors corresponding to Category 1 and Category 2 were the key transmission sectors for water consumption in the economic system, and they need more attention. This research suggests that water resource management policies should be formulated for the key transmission sectors in order to alleviate the pressure from water resource shortages.