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What Defines A Successful Automotive Social Media Strategy

Join a large church, Masons, PTA, volunteer to run a Toys for Tots program.......be social.

Thats what I think sells cars.

To me Social Media is just top of mind awareness, branding, and does have value. You just have to keep it in perspective.
 
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One of our clients (social media company), a Chevy dealer in Dallas is getting more hits to his website from Facebook than Cars.com and AutoTrader combined. There is an equation to getting results from social media, one factor: putting in the required work and incorporating several cornerstones of SM. It's listening and hearing your customers and what your competition is saying. And yes, it's highly measurable and highly effective.
 
One of our clients (social media company), a Chevy dealer in Dallas is getting more hits to his website from Facebook than Cars.com and AutoTrader combined. There is an equation to getting results from social media, one factor: putting in the required work and incorporating several cornerstones of SM. It's listening and hearing your customers and what your competition is saying. And yes, it's highly measurable and highly effective.

What are the cornerstones of social media?
 
I like what Ford did at NAIAS. *They had multiple employees on the Twitter stream. *Other OEM's were absent. *Seems to me a successful social media strategy should be measured in part by the amount of employee participation and engagement. *

I agree, for social media to be truly success there has to be three types of engagements or connections happening:

  • Employee / Community Member
  • Employee / Employee
  • Community Member/ Community Member
So, in order to gauge any success with social media you must be able to gauge your level of success within those 4 levels of interaction.
 
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Not sure if anyone posted this but... Facebook Posts Are 3 Times More Powerful Than Tweets

"For shares and Tweets, we were able to directly attribute sales to the original action, so we simply took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/tweets. For likes and follows, we had to estimate attribution by looking at our traffic references and subtracting out purchases made through shares/tweets as well as purchases made through direct traffic. None of our analysis captures long-term value of customers acquired through these social channels – which means the true value per action should be even greater. Gross revenue depends on the products/services being sold."

Social media marketing is about branding, and through branding you spread the word of who you are and what you do. Facebook will rarely be the "source" of where your customer came from, but it maybe where they originated from. Their sister follows you and see you have a tent sale going on and tells her brother who tells his gf and she comes in and purchases a car. The best you can do to measure this as earlier mentioned is ask every customer who comes in if they follow you on facebook, twitter, merchantcirlce, foursqaure, plurk, etc. But these should be to bring awareness and brand yourself.

If you really want your customers to be involved and actually listen to the shares/tweet/etc you post then you have to make sure to be diverse. Don't just post status updates about "this Monday huge sale" "this Tuesday free oil change" you want to be interactive and talk about what your audience is interested in, share positive quotes, recipes, etc.