If there’s a local or community event important to the dealership, focus on it. That’s a major part of social media strategy, IMO. Dealership don’t need to remind their social followers that they have cars for sale, they already know that. When choosing what to post, you shouldn’t act like a dealership, but still remember that you are a dealership. Don’t be pitchy. Don’t feed into stereotypes. Don’t be too “sales-oriented.” Instead, be brand, community, fun, and familial in orientation.
Truth is, to be successful on social media as a dealership, they have to stop thinking about yourself as a dealership, but instead, think of yourself as a company that helps out the local community. Giving people a social media smorgasbord of posts to review makes you more well-rounded. Like any delectable sampling of food does.
(In no particular order)
- Philanthropy and Charitable involvements
- Photos of new customers with their vehicles
- “Caption This” pictures
- Contests
- Partnerships with local sports teams, like http://www.baierl.com/blog/2015/04/pirates-announce-new-partnership-with-baierl-automotive.cfm (dead now)
- Video customer testimonials
- Random pics of humor, quotes, or thought-provoking imagery
- Questions to engage (think Trivial Pursuit, 1st date-style questions, Family Feud, or hypothetical in orientation)
- Reviews/Ratings from happy customers
- Service Discounts, Coupons – Not ‘sales-related’ content. (No “3.9% on Chevy’s until month’s end”- style posts)
- Upcoming community events (and their involvement in them)
- Nearby school events (and a mention of current employees from there)
- Good staff bios
- Job openings
- Very odd vehicles taken in on trade (a 2006 Chevy Malibu isn’t a worthy vehicle to share on your wall regardless of the “low miles”, but a DeLorean would be).
- Interesting facts based on that date in history
- Service How-To Videos
- Very high profile OEM/Dealership updates that are actually in the news (with your dealership’s response to it)
That said, I would definitely find out if your dealerships has a paid social media advertising budget, because organic reach isn't anywhere as effective, if it's effective at all. There's plenty of evidence suggesting weak organic performance.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspe...bout-the-death-of-organic-reach/#41836b2f7885
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Organic-Reach-on-Facebook
http://marketingland.com/facebook-kills-organic-reach-108160
If I were you, I'd look into Custom Audience targeting through Facebook / Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
For example:
https://www.facebook.com/business/a/custom-audiences
Previously, Facebook advertising had been too generic / broad, which probably suited Zuckerberg just fine in that they were still making a lot money, but at the same time wasting the efforts of their advertising customers. Lack of being able to drill down to a current customer and universe attack level.
It was a matter of time before they integrated a better advertising mechanism into their system. Basically,
Power Editor is a matching tool, which they have always had (a weak predecessor), but previously was not built on a CRM integration level (
importation of CRM dB's for use in customer matching). Having to match up customers or potential customer manually was a painstaking experience. I'll be interested in seeing how dealerships cope with this new requirement and what CRM's actively support them.
Custom audience targeted ads will be much more relevant than ads just targeted to a business fan’s or some biographical demographic. They can reach people who a business is sure purchased its products before, or that haven’t thanks to exclusionary targeting. Yes, businesses could just email these existing customers for free. However, Facebook can help them hone in on certain demographic segments of their customers by overlaying additional targeting parameters, and reach them vividly through the news feed instead of their dry inbox.
An automotive rooftop with E-mail addresses of its customers could target “
buy a new SUV” ads to people who bought an SUV 5+ years ago, while targeting “
Find nearby charging stations” to those who recently bought an electric vehicle.
IMO, it's a ploy by Facebook to sell more ads through customization techniques, which is smarter than what they were doing. It should have better results for dealerships, especially since most of them have a CRM of some type that exports out CSV and/or XML for importation into the
Facebook Power Editor.
