Facebook Likes for your dealership - How are you getting more?

[skeetle]

While it may be difficult to track specific sales off of Facebook (unless of course, it's a friend, or other specific circumstance etc), Have you thought of facebook as a way to drive traffic to your website? Do you have Google Analytics set up? What about another sort of website tracking? (most OEM back-end products have this built in).

Think of it this way - if someone is on your dealership's facebook page, & they click on your website - they know which website they're going to - so the bounce rate from these specific visits should :: in theory :: be relatively low.

It's just like if someone saw your vehicle on Cars.com/AutoTrader, but never e-mailed or called, they just showed up on your lot. If a facebook user doesn't "like" your page - are they still able to view it? Yup. Does that mean they can still click on the pictures/links you have on your page? Yup.

Instead of worry about actually selling cars on Facebook, worry about brand awareness and driving traffic to your website. If you put a picture of a customer who just purchased a vehicle up, make sure that customer is tagged, their friends will then see the picture (Facebook 101 here), those friends may "like" the specific picture & not your actual page, but they'll still know their friend bought their car from your dealership --> Brand Recognition. They may jump on your dealership page for a minute, snoop around & click some links -- to your website.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

You could give something like this a shot - HA!!

Pop that shit up right on your homepage.

 

[danoneil]

You do not have to throw discounts to get likes. If you interact with FB and like the facebook pages by your manufacturer, potential customers will find you.

 

[yagoparamo]

Why is so important to "like" to get a discount. You can "dis-like" as soon as you get the coupon.

Why not give the discount to everyone by promoting the fact that joining our social media will allow you to stay tuned to what future discounts we may offer?

Now to that thought, if you are willing to let 20% of the profit go shouldn't you promote that on your website so people can get used to engage you there? (your website has more ecommerce capabilities than your Facebook).

If you say that you should have the offer on both your website and FB then as a customer I would think that I don't need to "join" a FB account in order to get discounts, I can just go to your website.

Every way I see it FB seems to be on the way of promoting your website (which BTY has a lot more visitors/month than your FB account for most dealers).

 

[edduval]

thought it was time to share a few things about Facebook and how dealers can leverage it (and other social sites) to their benefit. I manage all of the web properties for a wild crazy gun totting car dealer in rural western missouri. We have two franchise rooftops, each has their own fb page managed primarily by the picture takers/porters at each location. One has 3,800+ likes, the other has 4,200+ likes. I've determined about 60% of those are real (or active) people, the rest are typical facebook sock puppets. Everyday we pull leads from facebook and many of them convert, although not all of them come from our pages (I'll explain further in a moment).

So how did we get our likes to grow, especially since we're in a rural area with a low population density?

We actively "engage" with other people, post items of interest to other Walls and truly participate in conversation. We go out and "like" other pages and posts, we comment and move conversation along.

Most importantly, we encourage our sales team to leverage their own facebook accounts to self promote (gently!) and thus promote our dealerships. This is the real secret, getting your staff to utilize it as a marketing tool and a source for prospects.

Think of social websites like being at a giant party. Most car dealers are the guy standing in a corner shouting to the whole room and never getting heard, since they look like lunatics nobody comes over to talk to them. But if you mingle, make conversation and express interest in other people then you genuinely gain friends. That's what it means to "engage" with people.

do I like everything that gets posted on our facebook accounts? No. In fact a lot of it drives me nuts, but for some reason people engage in it, mention it to their friends and SHARE what we're doing, so how can I fault it (although I'd be a lot happier if we'd stick to automotive themes).

We do these same things on Twitter and YouTube. We sell cars Nationwide and based on our sales numbers I'd say we're doing something right. Of course we can always do better and everyday we look for new things to tweak and grow. Change is an online constant...

So for what it's worth, those are a few things everyone might want to consider in their quest for "social" dominance. I'll log out and go back to trolling now.

 

[danoneil]

I could not explain better myself.

 

[TomLaPointe]

I think FB is a great tool if you are a store that FREQUENTLY uses it for customer events - car shows, appreciation events, and track or off-road events.

 

[bpreston]

Anyone have good examples of dealers who have a good Facebook page? By good I mean, a lot of likes, good content, interactive, and doing marketing through it.

Came across World Hyundai's and was really impressed: http://www.facebook.com/worldhyundai

Let me know of any other good ones.

 

[Robby Wilson]

This might sound odd coming from me since I work for a company that does indeed sell FB apps (among other things), but I actually much prefer that social media content come from the dealership itself. I can script, execute and manage an elaborate app for you of course. However, at the end of the day, I am not at your dealership, I don't know your company culture, the idiosyncrasies and intangibles of your market, etc.

I am happy to provide strategic assistance on techniques I know which have been proven to drive traffic and "likes", (many of which are highlighted above), but artificially induced likes using what basically amounts to deception is never the right way to go.

The only proven way to drive traffic with 100% certainty that I know of is to provide outstanding service to your customers and establish a fantastic reputation in your community. This makes the job of a social media coordinator at any dealership a cake walk.

 

[yagoparamo]

I have seen dealers spending lots of time adding content to their social media channels and getting very little in return from this.

I usually see a 2-5% interaction (based on total likes) in the postings (likes or typing) unless of course there is a giveaway or a free ipad. On the accounts that I'm set up as an admin I also see a 5-10% views on the posts (based on total likes). These numbers are from stores spending $300-400/month on Facebook just to add some content and without any major social media campaign or strategy. These are stores where their likes are "real" and the numbers have not been inflated with fakes. Even those with a social media strategy don't achieve most of the time much better percentages than that.

So while I can't argue that social media has a spot in what a business does for advertising I can't help to think that the amount of energy invested is providing a very small ROI not just on sales but also on the number of people that we are able to reach. Because of the nature of the social media networks (closed networks) only customers that have liked our pages can see our efforts and none of the data will be indexed by Google or any other search engines.

So last week I started an experiment with this dealer https://www.facebook.com/RairdonSmokeyPoint They pay us $300/month to do one entry a day in their Facebook pages, do the graphics, in short to keep it up to date. Since we also do their main website I decided to take on of the weekly postings (which I believe will have no negative effect in their Facebook pages) and do the social entry in their website.

For that we planned a few things. First of all we created a tab that says "Social" (and I'm inclined to remove their FB logo and link from the top banner) and started to put that one entry once a week (only one so far): Military Toy Drive

The entry was done with a key worded URL, a form, key words, and a link to Facebook. I didn't want to enter too much or do internal links at this time. Keeping it simple was my goal for now.

The entry is already indexed in Google Rairdon's Smokey Point is collecting toys for local military families - Google Search and while my search is conveniently done so my stuff shows remember that this was a test. We knew via our blog entries that this will work though jetta hybryd tacoma - Google Search

The key for me was to take advantage of social entries effort that we are already making and change it in to a useful SEO piece for our website. It also creates content engagement our site where I would rather have more pages views and time on site than contribute that way to Facebook's. In turn we also give our customers a reason to actually join our Social media effort, you may want t join this dealership toy drive, rather than just a blue square that you have to click and join in order to see what we are about.