Hello Korey:
Twitter was (when I was still as eCommerce Director in charge) an important piece of my puzzle, playing the Social media "game" for my dealer group. I saw Twitter more likely as a trend tool on what, who and when somebody was talking about my brand I sold. It further helped me enormous to monitor my competition and of course reputation in combination with my other social media tools. You have some inteesting facts about the vehicles you sell (crash test ratings, insurance classifiactions, new models to come, consumer awards), then write about it with your 140 characters and include a link, which will guide the interested reader to your dealer homepage and or blog, exposing more of your edited content.
I can determine that we sold out of our social media efforts (community channels, enthusiast sites, facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, etc.) approx. 2 - 7 cars/months, without pushing any sales message or feeding any onventory into the streams. Most efficient were the car enthusiasts websites like bimmerfest.com, acurazine, etc.
I still see, when visiting dealer principal during my new assignment, that the perception still is "we need to be on Social Media and when we do it how many cars can we sell out of it". Please keep in mind that we are trying to get possible consumers and existing customers with us engaged - no hard sell and NO soft sell, but much more starting a conversation. Who we are, why we are serving our community and what else we are able to do for our "fans and friends"...and I don't talk about the good old slogan "we are beating any price of the competition.
