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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?