Twitter For Your Dealership: Why & How

[jeremys]

thanks uncle joe!

 

[davidmoon]

Twitter needs to be part of your overall strategy, but Facebook business fan pages will only grow in popularity in 2011. Facebook is a location right on the main drag, keeping your brand and business better top-of-mind, and Twitter is a few side streets over.

 

[john.quinn]

Bump.

Is your store using Twitter? How? Anything to report?

 

[Neil Frutuoso]

I like using it for what was introduced to me as "crowd sourcing"

Use their advance search feature to plug in keywords within a mile radius of your dealerships town. Then engage conversations with those people in your direct market tweeting about these keywords.

Some keywords we look at, Car shopping, oil change, our dealer name, sell my car, the list is endless and only capped by your time and imagination


https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced


if in the normal search featuer you can use this search sting to accomplish the same: Keyword near:"town st" within:25mi

 

[MBissett]

Twitter has been a great tool for our dealership to connect with local businesses, organizations, and charities. Just 1 retweet from our local Downtown Alliance (who we followed and in turn followed us) got 1,000 additional people to potentially see and interact with our dealership's content. Our local pizza place frequently retweets and "Likes" our stuff as well. We happily return the favor because it builds good will, shows we're involved with the community, and gives us the ability to put content out there that's not "car" related. We still have a long way to go with Twitter but we're taking small steps forward every day.

 

[joe.pistell]

Twitter has been a great tool for our dealership to connect with local businesses, organizations, and charities. Just 1 retweet from our local Downtown Alliance (who we followed and in turn followed us) got 1,000 additional people to potentially see and interact with our dealership's content. Our local pizza place frequently retweets and "Likes" our stuff as well. We happily return the favor because it builds good will, shows we're involved with the community, and gives us the ability to put content out there that's not "car" related. We still have a long way to go with Twitter but we're taking small steps forward every day.

That's the smartest Twitter game plan I've ever heard.

Michael, have you or your team ever worked LinkedIn?

 

[MBissett]

Thank you for the feedback and kind words Joe, it's much appreciated! I have my own personal LinkedIn account but haven't jumped in with the dealership yet. If you or anyone else has some tips on getting started I'd love to hear them. Most of my social media focus is given to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and foursquare. It can be daunting sometimes to stay on top of all of them but I don't want to outsource our social media efforts because we'd lose that "local flavor".

 

[joe.pistell]

Michael,

Your twitter game plan fits well in the LinkedIn World. Local busineeses trying to reachout to each other. You won't find the local pizza shop there, but you'll find sales reps, small biz's like marketing and manuf'ing companies. Its on my todo list, if you get to it,, plz let me know what you find.

Good work and thnx!

 

[sweece]

Can I just say that I'm a little frustrated with all of the vendors that come in and throw around the words 'SEO' and 'Social Media' in the same sentence without any real understanding of what they're talking about? I notice in the original post she mentioned that having a Twitter account would provide 'SEO value' -- to what extent? Please be more specific.

I always try to ask salespeople this question and most of them don't have a very good answer. Sure, the twitter page might show up on a branded keyword search below several other pertinent pages, but beyond that, what REAL SEO value does it provide? I understand that having a social presence is important, but is it really necessary for every salesperson to try and tell me that their service is great for SEO? Let's be honest here, you don't make a twitter account to boost your SEO. In our niche, having a strong twitter presence doesn't affect dealer website rankings very much. Let's just call it like it is and say that it's a branding tool.

/rant

 

[joe.pistell]

Can I just say that I'm a little frustrated with all of the vendors that come in and throw around the words 'SEO' and 'Social Media' in the same sentence without any real understanding of what they're talking about? I notice in the original post she mentioned that having a Twitter account would provide 'SEO value' -- to what extent? Please be more specific.

I always try to ask salespeople this question and most of them don't have a very good answer. Sure, the twitter page might show up on a branded keyword search below several other pertinent pages, but beyond that, what REAL SEO value does it provide? I understand that having a social presence is important, but is it really necessary for every salesperson to try and tell me that their service is great for SEO? Let's be honest here, you don't make a twitter account to boost your SEO. In our niche, having a strong twitter presence doesn't affect dealer website rankings very much. Let's just call it like it is and say that it's a branding tool.

/rant

Damn you're good!