Facebook #1 Referrer to my site???

[joe.pistell]

I heard a great quote that was attributed to Kevin Frye in his presentation at the Digital Dealer conference as it related to Facebook and social media sites. "You have already sold your customers, fans, a car, quit trying to sell them another one". I think that is relevant to this thread. They are "social" media sites for that reason, to be sociable to your already acquired customers. That thread hit home with me on how I could best use my stores Facebook page, which is still in its infancy. If we sell a car today and have the customer "friend"us or "like" us on Facebook, why do we want to constantlly show them ads for other cars? Keep it social. Post articles on how to best maintain their car, articles about your dealerships community involvement, and ony other reason on why they should stay in touch with you to increase the traffic to your service lane and parts department. Post the occasional coupon or service department special with a link to the appointment page on your website. It may be a while before that "fan" shows up on our lot to buy another car, but we can try to get them back in our service department every few months for an oil change. Keep it social and the sales and service will come.

I'm with ya Bill. Kevin F. helped you with the spirit of content, but, it still needs to be built and worked. Us car dealer types are not well suited for writing creative and captivating content. Content just dosent "happen" you've got to create the overall theme and goals (so you won't drift off course), then you need to find the player to create your content, then it needs to be "worked'. This is WORK (read: not cheap). You don't have to look at ROI right away, but, you're going to want to see fruit for your months of investment. You're going to need to prove ROI sometime.

I saw Jesse L of MB Motorsport's work on another thread. He is VERY active. He's made a HUGE commitment to FB. See his work: www.facebook.com/mbmotorsport. After 12 months of that level of effort (and free details) you're going to want to count some cash coming from it.

Shoppers don't require you to have a FB account to do business with you. This FB effort is optional and all of this can be superseded by "The Next New Thing".

example:
Vynil>>8track>>Cassette>>CD>>XM>>iTunes>>Pandora... whats next?

 

[Alex Snyder]

Alex, the 8 sales per 1000 visits is almost the EXACT number we found on our DR Survey, we found ".... 6.4 sales for every 1000 visitors to your site." The idea of that thread was to help put an ROI on funding more internet traffic. Its interesting how that stat works with FB visitors also.

Very helpful indeed.

Ah yes - good point! I forgot about that stat.

 

[TuneyFish]

Good info Alex. 8 sales per 1000 visits maybe a little higher for some. Of course lower for others as well.

humm - as you would do in a site retargeteding display ad campaign, wonder if or when facebook will allow us to place a tracking cookie on our facebook pages? Allowing us to follow the customer from fb to our dealer website and to a conversion. It's got to be possible.

You can tag the URL's then filter them in Google Analytics to see what content is appealing to your audience.

Here is how to setup the unique url building. If you enter a ? after any URL and add some parameters, you can filter those parameters in Analytics.

Tool: URL Builder - Analytics Help

For conversion rate, you can track conversions using Event Tracker and then determine where you're seeing the most value - which links are getting used, etc.

 

[joe.pistell]

http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/why-social-media-is-bs

 

[TuneyFish]

Found out why Joe questions Facebook....

 

[joe.pistell]

Found out why Joe questions Facebook....

Scott,

only 10 miles? WTF, the gas station is farther away than that! You gotta think quasi-rural. (is that a word?)

 

[TuneyFish]

Uncle Joe's throwing a Facebook Party

Use UTM tags!

<snip>A common problem with evaluating web traffic sent from advertising, such as Google Adwords, is knowing exactly where traffic is coming from. You often know the referring URL, but you rarely know more than that. It would be helpful to know exactly where people come from, even down to a specific ad or link you’ve published, because that knowledge will help you invest your marketing dollars more wisely in the future.If you know the accurate source of traffic, you can invest more in those sources that work, and less in those that don’t.</snip>Read the Full Article from facebook.com

Perhaps converting them to become a fan first is a better ROI. But then you have to know community management and how to engage your supporters to get them coming back -

Do you know which ads are performing better from a single source?

Which page / banner / copy gets the best CTR, Conversion...?

Is it the category pages?

Or perhaps where the conversation is most active and people are spending a considerably higher time on page - my guess is probably the latter but would need the data to analyze that specifically.

Who in your area do you want to reach? Select a demographic and try to focus on what they do.

What profession?

And certainly don't forget where they do it! - Joe, I tacked on another 15 miles for ya!