Social Media

Now that Google+ is open to businesses, many are trying to figure out the best way to utilize this new social media portal (including DealerOn).  I’ve gathered some of the more common mistakes that businesses are making to shorten the learning curve for auto dealerships.

Like all other social media sites, not posting on a regular basis can hurt your marketing efforts.  Consistently providing visitors with quality, worthwhile content is the best way to attract (and keep) potential dealership customers engaged in your social sharing.

Google+ really lends itself to sharing photos, so make sure you take full advantage.  Switch up your text posts with photos of your vehicles, dealership, and staff.  Make sure your profile photo identifies your dealership to help ensure your visitors know they’ve found the right Google+ page.

To further help identify your profile, make sure your tagline is clear and descriptive.  Use it as a way to stand out from other dealerships and make it very clear to visitors that this is an official page for your dealership.

One of the great things about Google+ is the ease in which you can segment your viewers…so make sure that you do!  Consider separating potential customers from those that have previously bought from your dealership, or segment those that bought used cars from those that bought new.  Take advantage of the ability to tailor the information you are sharing with your visitors.

Those that are using Google+, what mistakes have you made and learned from so far?

The verdict on Google+ for personal use still seems to be out for many (myself included).  But according to Christian Oestlien, group product manager for social advertising at Google has said that they are “close to unveiling Google+ business profiles”.

Only Ford and GM have official profiles right now (interesting that they are both automotive brands).  Some businesses have created profiles, even though most sit blank; just so you know, there isn’t a limit to how many times a name can be used, so no need to claim your dealership’s name ahead of time.  I see this being a problem in the future.  Google+ will need a way to verify business accounts, much like Twitter and Google Places have, or I think they will lose out on some trust.

Will your dealership take another look at using Google+ once businesses are allowed?  What if Google+ ends up integrating with Google Places?

One of the difficult parts of maintaining a successful social media marketing campaign is attracting the “right” people and getting your customers and prospects to interact with your dealership online.  While this won’t solve all of these problems, being able to find your dealership contacts in social media accounts is a start.

There is a pretty simple way to find your dealership contacts in social media sites like Twitter that I found while reading SEOptimise, an SEO blog from England.

First, export your customer list into a CSV file.  Below is an example of how to do this from Constant Contact. Since you’ll only need names and email addresses, go ahead and delete all of the other fields.  Also, make sure you delete those with no email address.

Using a Gmail account, import this CSV file.  If you create a separate group for these contacts, they will be easier to manage.

Now, log into your social media accounts (like Twitter) and search for contacts using Gmail.

How does your dealership help ensure you connect with your customers and prospects through your social media accounts?

Until now, Facebook has allowed advertisers on their platform to target users based on age, sex, interests and location (country, state, and city).  In order to drill down even further, Facebook now allows users to target their ads by zip code as well.

When creating your Facebook ad, just add the zip codes that you would like to target.  Unlike Google AdWords, you can’t use a radius to target further, so make sure that you are including any zip codes from which your dealership could draw customers.

This is especially helpful for dealerships either in or near large cities. For example, if your dealership is located south of a major city, it may make sense for you to only target those in the southern zip codes of that city.  For dealerships in cities like Los Angeles or New York, targeting your ads by zip code, instead of broadcasting to the entire city, could save a lot of money and help bring in customers more likely to buy.

This refinement will also allow your ad to appear more often.  For example, if before your ad was being shown to everyone between the ages of 25-34 in Washington DC, and you can now limit that to show to those in one or two city zip codes, the average number of times your ad shows during your campaign should increase.  Your ad will be shown more times to a smaller, more targeted group of people.

As a side note, some data firms are noting that there may be discrepancies in the number of users Facebook is showing in each zip code when compared to census data.  According to XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, this issue isn’t exclusive to Facebook and should get more and more accurate as geographic, IP, and user reported data gets sorted and more refined.

Does your dealership use Facebook ads?  If so, are you going to test the ability to target by zip code to increase ROI?