Facebook Marketplace: Overhyped Solution?

[clasione]

I hear a lot talk about Facebook Marketplace and lots of solicitations from companies who offer posting services but when I list cars on the marketplace, either when I was doing it under the business page, and now under my personal account, all I get is non-sence SPAM from people who want me to text them codes so they can try a rip-me-off.

Does any actually get real appointments and sell vehicles are marketplace.
I'd lover to hear some positive stories about it, because to me, it seems like Marketplace is
just a haven for spam inquiries from fake users.

 

[jon.berna]

Facebook marketplace aka fancy craigslist is at the perfect equilibrium of abuse. The 4 forces private sellers, dealerships, vendors and customers are all not getting what they want out of it. There is just so much traffic on the site its hard to ignore it, especially for smaller Indys who I am guessing is who you're after. Everyone hates it and the number of companies that post for dealerships has to be at peak.

If you are trying to offer an alternative I would recommend a performance based model.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading scambait on reddit: Reddit - Dive into anything

 

[clasione]

If Facebook were smart, maybe they would allow ads to contain phone numbers because its the forced use of messenger system that I think is the problem. In my experience, on multiple platforms such as Craigslist, OfferUp, FB Marketplace, all of the messages are spam.

At this point I just ignore all messages. Text messages are auto responded to call the dealership.
If someone cannot take the time to pickup the phone, its almost always junk in one way or another.

 

[jon.berna]

Well if they did that they couldn't track it and police it. Think of all the bad stuff that happens now when it is tracked. Can you imagine. It's too easy to setup a profile to farm / spam. The issue is in bot and automation detection. If you could only serve posts to humans it wouldn't be as bad.

 

[clasione]

You're absolutely right.
They want to snoop on the messages or Facebook phone call system.

 

[willandre]

In my experience, the signal to noise ratio on Marketplace simply isn't worth the time. There are already a million things interrupting our daily flow and this scam feed is low on the list of additional interruptions warranted. If you want to take advantage of the "scale" of Facebook, you're better off sponsoring posts with a link to your VDPs. Even at a nominal budget, you'll get Marketplace-like attention with better filtering and targeting.

 

[clasione]

In my experience, the signal to noise ratio on Marketplace simply isn't worth the time. There are already a million things interrupting our daily flow and this scam feed is low on the list of additional interruptions warranted. If you want to take advantage of the "scale" of Facebook, you're better off sponsoring posts with a link to your VDPs. Even at a nominal budget, you'll get Marketplace-like attention with better filtering and targeting.

Well said and I agree..... Just boost posts and run ads and gather the traffic.
FB Messenger has only been a complete waste of time for me.

The ratio seems like 99/1 with most everything being spam, maybe a rouge real person here and there.
Never had anything half way productive on the messenger. I don't think anyone really knows what they are talking about.

Maybe a lot of action, but a lot of action from fake users.

 

[Todd Thompson]

Was thinking back to this discussion.

If you can attribute sales to leads properly, this is a no brainer. Its simply working or it isn't.
Here's the caveat: you'd be assuming your sales people are have their act together, responding properly, proper followup, best practices and so on. That can often be the fail point... your reps may be sh*tty at followup and FB leads need to be nurtured since the initial impetus often was they were simply sitting in their underwear at 3am and thought the car looked cool so they clicked.

So if you aren't REALLY tracking what the reps are doing, that can be the issue. Everyone claims they can track those, but few really can or take the time to go over each lead with the rep.

I can say in our case (roughly 70 stores), they get a lot of eyeballs, plenty of incoming 'leads', but if those reps are hating FB leads because they feel they aren't 'real', you need to assign to a believer.

On as side note: SubPrime credit leads is pretty decent from FB lead ads if you can work around all their restrictions.

 

[clasione]

your reps may be sh*tty at followup and FB leads need to be nurtured since the initial impetus often was they were simply sitting in their underwear at 3am and thought the car looked cool so they clicked.

That is a pretty good point to consider. Maybe the FB Messenger Leads just need much more nurturing. You are at least getting to build a relationship with a consumer who is likely to be A) local and B) car shopping.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Now that marketplace listings have to be manually posted by personal Facebook profiles, here are some additional things to consider:

• Who is getting a list of new cars and ensuring they don't get posted multiple times?
• Who is updating pricing?
• Who is removing cars when they're sold?
• Who is ensuring that appropriate disclaimers are being disclosed?
• Who is ensuring that all communication is logged in the CRM?

Personally, I don't believe organic marketplace listings are worth the hassle anymore, much better to just automatically advertise all of your cars in the marketplace feed by running Facebook automotive inventory ads and linking direct to your website VDP.