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Facebook: what has it done for you lately?
- Off Topic & Everything Else
- 10 Replies
I also feel that paying a 3rd party company to manage your Social media marketing is a waste of money...period. As an Internet director I focus on driving traffic in the same ways you mentioned:
"If you’re trying to increase sales, then tackle the SEO side of things
first. Providing useful, meaningful content on your website, strong
backlinks and an easy-to-navigate web design can go a long way."
However, as a former SEO consultant who continues to stay in the know, I (half) disagree with your post. Yea facebook is nice to have fans blah blah etc and doesnt really help sales, But FB is about one percent of social media, and the best way to build quality backlinks is via social media (maybe not on fb but other sites). I have studied SEO for a long time and a transition is occuring where SEO and SMM are really going to merge. Everyone knows that google is the search engine to focus on mainly, and with google+ being released (ive tried it and it has VERY serious potential) the search engine is now a social media site. I would never advocate hiring a third party SEO firm for a car dealership, but having a social media strategy that is handled in house I feel is VITAL. Whether its an internet manager, the sales reps, or a social media manager, you should have someone who knows the company well and can speak as the company.
As for Facebook, we have just a few thousand "fans" and we get about 5-10 deals a month via FB (mostly by letting the sales reps use FB during downtime, and training them how to do it correctly!). But more importantly our engagement is pretty good which means that the next time those fans need a new car we are at the top of their mind!
So in short please don't attack social media, Because soon the whole internet will be "social media"
"If you’re trying to increase sales, then tackle the SEO side of things
first. Providing useful, meaningful content on your website, strong
backlinks and an easy-to-navigate web design can go a long way."
However, as a former SEO consultant who continues to stay in the know, I (half) disagree with your post. Yea facebook is nice to have fans blah blah etc and doesnt really help sales, But FB is about one percent of social media, and the best way to build quality backlinks is via social media (maybe not on fb but other sites). I have studied SEO for a long time and a transition is occuring where SEO and SMM are really going to merge. Everyone knows that google is the search engine to focus on mainly, and with google+ being released (ive tried it and it has VERY serious potential) the search engine is now a social media site. I would never advocate hiring a third party SEO firm for a car dealership, but having a social media strategy that is handled in house I feel is VITAL. Whether its an internet manager, the sales reps, or a social media manager, you should have someone who knows the company well and can speak as the company.
As for Facebook, we have just a few thousand "fans" and we get about 5-10 deals a month via FB (mostly by letting the sales reps use FB during downtime, and training them how to do it correctly!). But more importantly our engagement is pretty good which means that the next time those fans need a new car we are at the top of their mind!
So in short please don't attack social media, Because soon the whole internet will be "social media"
Facebook: what has it done for you lately?
- Off Topic & Everything Else
- 10 Replies
And since no one else seems to be saying it I’ll go ahead and break the ice: Facebook isn’t as important as you think. In fact, most social media really doesn’t help drive sales at all.As the Ecommerce Director for a large, Ohio-based automotive group, I’ve found putting more time, money and effort into the SEO side of things has helped our business expand more rather than spending all day checking and updating our Facebook page. While Facebook can benefit your business’ reputation, traffic comes from SEO.
If you’re trying to increase sales, then tackle the SEO side of things first. Providing useful, meaningful content on your website, strong backlinks and an easy-to-navigate web design can go a long way.
It’s why I can’t for the life of me, figure out why so many of our competitors are paying thousands of dollars to third-party groups to manage their social media, especially since Social Media is free to use.
On a monthly basis, I receive phone calls from Social Media groups giving me the same spiel:
My rebuttal:
Silence
Rather than try to bribe people to like us on Facebook, I’ve found simply offering worthwhile content can go a long way. After all, we want to build a reputation of delivering great customer service; not prizes. Create a promotional video that drives the right kind of Facebook traffic. Don't forget Facebook is free for everyone to use so have some fun with it.
I'm just curious, but why would you pay someone to run your own personal Facebook page?
DealerRater Reviews on Google - What Happened? A Quick Q & A
- Automotive News, Press Releases, and Events
- 11 Replies
Jeff, thanks for the kudos but I'd prefer you giving my product much closer scrutiny .
Please understand there's much more depth to this program than I could treat here without getting bogged down in people's understandable imaginings of what it is we actually do. Our impact is far beyond "show," I assure you. You may believe you've seen the "pitch" before but whatever it was it was not for anything resmbing what we do because we have yet to find anyone competing on our battleground.
I guarantee you nobody does what we do. Furthermore, there's no need to use scare quotes around the number of our partner sites. That's a real number.
Jeff, you're correct that these sites in themselves are generic and have no industry authority, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest our product as an alternative to DR, Edwards, or others like them in the particular ways they represent the auto industry and serve consumers. Instead, I was building on your lament about the shortcomings of relying upon one site to provide for reputation management needs, and I did so by pointing out the limitations of merely widening the scope to include a handful of others like them.
While we cannot do much of what they do (and we don't intend to) the fact still remains they also cannot do what we can do, and that cannot be so easily dismissed before comprehending completely the full impact of our branding model on dealership marketing goals. Remember, each googe result the client owns is one less distraction threatening to steal away the prospect who started out focusing on you but who never makes it to your site. SEO cannot solve this problem, whether for your site or industry sites like DR. Presumably DR and most dealers have SEO in place while still losing prospects who never make it to their site.
I hope I don't sound arrogant with this next statement, but I submit to you that the authority inherent in our model is the highest authority of all: that of the happy, satisfied customer whose positive testimonial is no longer stuck in a folder buried in a dealer managers's desk or waiting patiently for visitors to that corner of your website so assigned to that occasional task - if they get there. We are backed by the authority of a happy consumer whose testimony is now actively engaged and multipled so that each review we launch is the online equivilent of Madison Square Garden full of screaming fans.
We proliferate the same review across so many sites that along with the other content distributed similarly we are able to shape what the viewer sees when they search your dealership. Our snippets utilize "title expressions" (our in-house term, hence the scare quotes) taken from the customer's own words in upper-case, so a viewer scanning the search results page sees positive, glowing sentiments strewn throughout the page. Consumers give more credibility to other consumers "just like them" (or so the subtextual thinking would have it) than they do to paid spokesmen. Sites with authority as I think you mean it are a modern high-tech variation of the same concept of the paid spokesman.
Still, we don't intend to be an alternative to much of what they do EXCEPT in obtaining the greatest value you can get from your legitimate consumer testimonials. So what are the benefits of our model which give it such exalted value?
Eighty-one percent of consumers search a company with whom they might have interest in doing business. Use the Google ad word tool to measure the total monthly searches under your trading name(s) or URL, and compare to the total number of unique visits you get. Most firms find they get 10-20%.
Losing 80-90% (or even half that) of prospects who started out interested in you but disappeared along the way is not only an illustration of burning leads before you even see them but also represents the ultimate neutralization of your marketing and advertising campaigns which got them to the point of googling you to begin with. THAT's the bleed-out we staunch, except unlike Rambo cauteizing his own battlefield wounds with a red-hot knife our approach doesn't hurt because we are also a branding tool and a reputation management tool.
Each of these reviews is back-linked to the client site, which adds a significant and growing boost to their SEO. We normally are able to at least double the traffic from company search results, and often more.
Jeff, I could go on here but I already have gotten into making points better covered in the tour my CEO would love to personally present to you online. He comes from the auto industry; our company used to design high-conversion (30% plus) websites for the dealerships and lenders until we accidentally stumbled onto this solution. We completely changed our business model to this product line once we grasped the ramifications.
No insult intended but it seems you may be drawing some conclusions as to what we do and the limitations to dealer value you perceive. It's reasonable to do given how little substance I am able to communicate in this format but you can't fully grasp the power of this thing unless you've seen it up close. In this you are not alone; because what we do is so far outside wide-ranging previous business experience people constantly express to us after the presentation that when we first approached them they had no idea that what we were talking about would lead to what they had just seen.
So, as a courtesy I want to offer you a challenge and a small wager (the fact I'm not a betting man ought to tell you something). You give my CEO 25-30 minutes for the presentation along with your active participation. Ask him all your questions and challenge him all you want. I advise you to allow another 15 minutes or so because your inevitable questions will likely cause us to go to 45 minutes (an hour is not unusual once our prospective client becomes better acquainted with us). BTW, I've never seen anyone dismiss our product after the presentation and bail out with no further interest. There is always discussion.
If you hold to your original position and dismiss our product's value to the auto industry then I'll send you a $10 Starbuck's gift card as "consolation" for lost time. Of course, it's not much nor is it intended to be so to keep the focus on what's really important. I mean this as a friendly wager only; I'm playing for higher stakes such things and don't want to be distracted by that which has little value.
OTOH, if you are impressed by Mr. Coleman's brainchild and express that via an agreement with Younger's and/or an alternative but similar arrangement then I'll quite naturally "forgive" the gift card.
Who knows, contrary to your initial take the tour experience might make great fodder for a future blog post. If appropriate or desirable you even may invite Alex Snyder, Joe Pistell or anyone else you choose.
We operate out of Vancouver WA (we draw our engineering genius from the rich talent pools emanating from Microsoft & HP) so the earliest we can meet with you is 11:00 a.m. EDT (8:00 a.m. PDT) M-F, but conversely we can stay late (8 p.m. EDT) with you as well.
To take me up on my offer you may contact me at the e-mail in my post sign-up here; again, I'll again refrain from posting my contact information on your blog. Besides, it'll have so much more power behind it if you eventually come to recommend your readership to examine us for themselves.
Phil Steinacker
.Please understand there's much more depth to this program than I could treat here without getting bogged down in people's understandable imaginings of what it is we actually do. Our impact is far beyond "show," I assure you. You may believe you've seen the "pitch" before but whatever it was it was not for anything resmbing what we do because we have yet to find anyone competing on our battleground.
I guarantee you nobody does what we do. Furthermore, there's no need to use scare quotes around the number of our partner sites. That's a real number.
Jeff, you're correct that these sites in themselves are generic and have no industry authority, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest our product as an alternative to DR, Edwards, or others like them in the particular ways they represent the auto industry and serve consumers. Instead, I was building on your lament about the shortcomings of relying upon one site to provide for reputation management needs, and I did so by pointing out the limitations of merely widening the scope to include a handful of others like them.
While we cannot do much of what they do (and we don't intend to) the fact still remains they also cannot do what we can do, and that cannot be so easily dismissed before comprehending completely the full impact of our branding model on dealership marketing goals. Remember, each googe result the client owns is one less distraction threatening to steal away the prospect who started out focusing on you but who never makes it to your site. SEO cannot solve this problem, whether for your site or industry sites like DR. Presumably DR and most dealers have SEO in place while still losing prospects who never make it to their site.
I hope I don't sound arrogant with this next statement, but I submit to you that the authority inherent in our model is the highest authority of all: that of the happy, satisfied customer whose positive testimonial is no longer stuck in a folder buried in a dealer managers's desk or waiting patiently for visitors to that corner of your website so assigned to that occasional task - if they get there. We are backed by the authority of a happy consumer whose testimony is now actively engaged and multipled so that each review we launch is the online equivilent of Madison Square Garden full of screaming fans.
We proliferate the same review across so many sites that along with the other content distributed similarly we are able to shape what the viewer sees when they search your dealership. Our snippets utilize "title expressions" (our in-house term, hence the scare quotes) taken from the customer's own words in upper-case, so a viewer scanning the search results page sees positive, glowing sentiments strewn throughout the page. Consumers give more credibility to other consumers "just like them" (or so the subtextual thinking would have it) than they do to paid spokesmen. Sites with authority as I think you mean it are a modern high-tech variation of the same concept of the paid spokesman.
Still, we don't intend to be an alternative to much of what they do EXCEPT in obtaining the greatest value you can get from your legitimate consumer testimonials. So what are the benefits of our model which give it such exalted value?
Eighty-one percent of consumers search a company with whom they might have interest in doing business. Use the Google ad word tool to measure the total monthly searches under your trading name(s) or URL, and compare to the total number of unique visits you get. Most firms find they get 10-20%.
Losing 80-90% (or even half that) of prospects who started out interested in you but disappeared along the way is not only an illustration of burning leads before you even see them but also represents the ultimate neutralization of your marketing and advertising campaigns which got them to the point of googling you to begin with. THAT's the bleed-out we staunch, except unlike Rambo cauteizing his own battlefield wounds with a red-hot knife our approach doesn't hurt because we are also a branding tool and a reputation management tool.
Each of these reviews is back-linked to the client site, which adds a significant and growing boost to their SEO. We normally are able to at least double the traffic from company search results, and often more.
Jeff, I could go on here but I already have gotten into making points better covered in the tour my CEO would love to personally present to you online. He comes from the auto industry; our company used to design high-conversion (30% plus) websites for the dealerships and lenders until we accidentally stumbled onto this solution. We completely changed our business model to this product line once we grasped the ramifications.
No insult intended but it seems you may be drawing some conclusions as to what we do and the limitations to dealer value you perceive. It's reasonable to do given how little substance I am able to communicate in this format but you can't fully grasp the power of this thing unless you've seen it up close. In this you are not alone; because what we do is so far outside wide-ranging previous business experience people constantly express to us after the presentation that when we first approached them they had no idea that what we were talking about would lead to what they had just seen.
So, as a courtesy I want to offer you a challenge and a small wager (the fact I'm not a betting man ought to tell you something). You give my CEO 25-30 minutes for the presentation along with your active participation. Ask him all your questions and challenge him all you want. I advise you to allow another 15 minutes or so because your inevitable questions will likely cause us to go to 45 minutes (an hour is not unusual once our prospective client becomes better acquainted with us). BTW, I've never seen anyone dismiss our product after the presentation and bail out with no further interest. There is always discussion.
If you hold to your original position and dismiss our product's value to the auto industry then I'll send you a $10 Starbuck's gift card as "consolation" for lost time. Of course, it's not much nor is it intended to be so to keep the focus on what's really important. I mean this as a friendly wager only; I'm playing for higher stakes such things and don't want to be distracted by that which has little value.
OTOH, if you are impressed by Mr. Coleman's brainchild and express that via an agreement with Younger's and/or an alternative but similar arrangement then I'll quite naturally "forgive" the gift card.
Who knows, contrary to your initial take the tour experience might make great fodder for a future blog post. If appropriate or desirable you even may invite Alex Snyder, Joe Pistell or anyone else you choose.
We operate out of Vancouver WA (we draw our engineering genius from the rich talent pools emanating from Microsoft & HP) so the earliest we can meet with you is 11:00 a.m. EDT (8:00 a.m. PDT) M-F, but conversely we can stay late (8 p.m. EDT) with you as well.
To take me up on my offer you may contact me at the e-mail in my post sign-up here; again, I'll again refrain from posting my contact information on your blog. Besides, it'll have so much more power behind it if you eventually come to recommend your readership to examine us for themselves.
Phil Steinacker
