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Disclosure: Social media doesn’t provide dealerships with direct ROI.
There, I said it, now let’s see what it can do to impact your dealership.
Most of us in the auto business would never think of shopping for a vehicle on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter (really, Twitter?) so many dealerships don’t dedicate resources to these advertising types.
If they do it’s an after-thought.
Or pay a vendor big $$$ to do it poorly for them.
The responsibility usually gets thrown on someone that they happen to see most on Facebook when walking by their desk.
Results add up to zero, everyone throws their hands up in the air and the Facebook page gets neglected until the next 20 Group meeting.
So why is it so important to know how your dealership ranks in the eyes of search engines on these social media outlets?
Dealership’s interested in growing their brand, measuring their influence and monitoring what the general public thinks about them.
Don’t think it’s important? Then don’t cry next time you’re -20% YOY or MOM.
With this data, you can build a comprehensive view of your standings in the social web. In short; Branding!
Typical Dealership Response
“I’m still not impressed… branding, measuring influence, whatever… we’re the biggest [OEM] dealership in town with the lowest prices. People don’t care about anything else.”
My Response
“True that Mr. or Mrs. dealership owner, however think of social media as real estate on the internet and every business is assigned a piece of it.
If you don’t use it, someone else will. If you don’t maintain it, people will vandalize it and if you don’t monitor it, you’ll never know what people are saying behind your back; true or not.”
How to use Social Mention
Click on link, enter your dealerships name, view the results. Then enter your competitions dealership name, view the results.
Social Mention is the most comprehensive and FREE tool available for any business to see how their brand or their competition’s brand, stands out in social media.
I don’t have any special tip-and-tricks for best use on this tool so if you want to get intricate I suggest checking out their FAQ’s to see how it would work best for your scenario.
Some observations from light use with this tool have been:
- You Tube seems to have the biggest influence in social media rankings.
- Guessing because of settings or dealerships lack of knowledge and/or use of Facebook doesn’t seem to have as much influence as we’d like to see.
- Anything related to public Google Picasa Photo Albums or Google+ Pages seems to be a strong influence.
If you use Social Mention for a dealership presentation, please stop back here and share your experience!
