Cars.com/DealerRater - Dealers Facebook Posts are ClickBait

[DrewAment]

Just an FYI... this is still happening.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Just an FYI... this is still happening.

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[Jeff Kershner]

Just an FYI... this is still happening.

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Still no issues on this end. Works like a charm. I wonder if your frequency is set too high?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

@DrewAment is this issue still persisting for your dealers or have you found any workarounds? I was on the phone with John over at SocialDealer, reviewing my social media audit and this topic came up, as they too have had several dealers with the same issue. I've been using the auto-post feature for a few years now with no issues (knock on wood.) We are thinking it may have something to do with the frequency of posting.

 

[DrewAment]

Was still a problem, no matter the frequency - I just ended up turning off the auto-posting of DealerRater posts to the dealers Facebook pages for almost all my dealers.

 

[Ryan Everson]

They would have been more worthwhile if DealerRater could have created a dynamic open graph image with the review text snippet as the image preview of the link (perhaps the star rating and review text snippet dynamically layered on top of a photo of our dealership).

I agree with a lot of the ideas presented here and am curious to dig into some in more detail. The open graph image idea that @Ryan Everson mentioned is very interesting to me - particularly because it entices someone enough to want to click through to continue reading. The page they'd be clicking through to is where they could ultimately submit a lead. Happy to explore than one a little further.

I'm always happy to spitball new ideas, even if it means looking at existing features with a more critical lens. DealerRater isn't a young company and there's always a need for products and features to evolve. I appreciate everyone's comments on this thread.

@Mike Lauf any progress on the evolution of this feature?

 

[oldershawj02]

Happy New Year all. @Ryan Everson Mike is out until later next week on paternity leave but I'm happy to jump in here with an update and when Mike's back he can respond more specifically to your question.

We spent a good deal of time with our FB contacts last year troubleshooting this issue and while they wouldn't give away the "secret sauce" of the clickbait algo we got some general guidance that allowed us to test various improvements. The last update went live mid-October and since then we've seen a significant reduction in clickbait notifications from dealerships as a result. As Mike mentioned last spring on this thread, we take this very seriously and will continue to monitor closely as FB evolves their algorithms.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

@oldershawj02 - any chance DealerRater is currently having issues with connecting with Facebook? I received this message this morning BUT the Connect button is not working/reconnecting to our FB page. I posted the issue here because maybe they're are tired together?

 

[oldershawj02]

@Jeff Kershner We've heard this from a handful of dealers over the past couple days so it's something we're actively triaging with FB. They'll occasionally make some tweaks to connectivity requirements without letting partners know so it requires some catch-up on our end. If there's action that dealers need to take, I'll post here, otherwise I'll take this off thread to make sure you're up to speed on our efforts to fix.

This does NOT appear to be related to the click-bait issue from last year...thus far the fix we put in place for that late last year seems to be holding well.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Thanks for keep an eye on the forums @oldershawj02 - appreciate it. Thanks for the update!