Social media marketing becomes an everyday part of car dealers marketing. Companies should dedicate resources and harness social media to find out how to use social channels for the brand.
The communication is different now and should include combination of marketing, public relations, brand and product knowledge. The tone should be personal and you should speak with both authority and enthusiasm. This helps you to break through barriers, become brand ambassadors and personally influence those who are important for your business.
Think about your sales and marketing. How do you reach your target audience (true fans, enthusiasts, owners, prospects and industry watchers). What makes prospects into buyers? What social tools could be used to help people through different stages of consideration, evaluation and purchase decisions. Find out what works best for you building awareness, helping to make a decision, converting people who consider competitors, provide services to owners post-purchase?
Always ask yourself “why” are you doing something before “what”. This way you can concentrate on bottom line and real business value.
Here are some tips, examples and links to articles that will help you to get you social media activities going.
Jeep combines different social media tools to tie together the community of fans. Twitter, Facebook, user images and featured content help users to interact with the brand and share it with their friends.
is a really great example on how a local dealership can use Facebook. This car dealer integrated their entire lot to a Facebook fan page so you can can browse all the cars without leaving Facebook. BMW of Minnetonka have created a visually appealing landing page for people who are not yet fans and they have an active wall interacting with their fans.
During 2008-09 iCrossing UK, a global digital marketing agency, ran a programme of social media activity for Toyota GB to help raise awareness of its iQ city car. This initiative was based on a core blog and a series of activities designed to create word-of-mouth referrals that drove traffic to the blog and generated interest in the car itself. Download the iCrossing case study (PDF).
Not a professional reviewer or a journalist but a real consumer who could give honest reviews and thoughts on Volkswagen’s small compact 4×4 the Tiguan. The reviews were then released online to help people see personal reviews and opinions on how this car performs in real life.
Ford Social Marketing+Auto Industry
Presentations from Scott Monty. He is the head of social media for Ford Motor Company.
If I could pick one type of site that is a “must have” for car dealers wanting to get started in social media, what would it be? My answer, hands down, is a dealership blog. Before Facebook, Twitter, or any of the others, a blog is the best place to get started.
The list of 30 Social Media action items come together to form a sound strategy for most dealerships. These 30 strategy and tactic descriptions were graciously supplied by Inc. Magazine. They were originally prepared as part of a comprehensive social media “cheat sheet” for the time-challenged business owner or entrepreneur. Here is a link to the Inc. Magazine Business Owner Social media Toolkit. I really like what April Joyner put together in the following list because each item listed is described in a way that quickly communicates the strategy, tactical execution requirements and the promised payoff!
This whitepaper will provide a brief description of social media, its importance and insights on how dealerships can integrate social media into their marketing strategies.
Creating Value in Social Media
Create unique content every day
Unique content is what people are looking for and Google knows that. Fresh and original content is more valued and you gain better ran in Google which brings you more visitors. Creating great content every day is not hard. Point to other resources, share your experiences, help and give value to customers. Not everyone knows what to do when you got a flat tire or need to jump star a car.
Share your content
If you create valuable content then other want to use it too. Leverage that! Find other sites that are interested in your content and gain more visitors. Which sites might find your blog posts, images and videos interesting and find out if they are interested on publishing your content. This can bring you free traffic and you gain much valued link power that will boost you Google rankings.
Let others know you are creating content
Post links to your material in relevant online communities, social media channels, forums, Facebook, Twitter and so on. It can make dramatic difference if you spread the word. Others will pick up and pas your links on. Search engines find those links and the authority of your web properties goes up
Open comments
The main goal of the social media efforts is to engage people. This is a must! So, everything you put up in the social web should be open to comments, ratings, and sharing. This will help you to tie people to your site as they feel that their contributions are being valued and responded to. Open interaction will give you many benefits, such as being your online focus group and sounding board, getting expert opinions from other specialists, showing an human face, etc.
Less advertising, more value
Social media is not another channel to spam with your banners and self serving salesy news items.
Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
The following table contains the names of over 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online… The left side column is the name of the organization, and it is linked to their organizational or corporate home page. The right side column displays a link to the actual document of policy web page for you to either download or review.
In a hurry? Use The Social media Policy Tool to get your social media policy in minutes. Answer a series of questions and instantly generate a draft policy customized to your business. PolicyTool policies provide a comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.
Creating a Facebook fan page for your business or product is quite a common approach today. We create a page for product x and then go on the journey of getting as many people as possible to like our product. A good enough way to get clients, when done right – but you can push it even further.
A much less used tactic today is using the same fan pages, but two of them. By that I mean creating the first fan page for the generic field itself. So lets say that you are in the yoghurt business. What is the wider field connected to that? There are probably more than one, but the main one would be milk (I am in no way connected to the “Milk” fan page in Facebook, I’m just using it as an example). This is the first thing you should do – create a fan page for the generic field. Why? Because if people will like Momma Jane’s yoghurt better than Pappa Jay’s, they will still like dairy products. People may not be familiar to your own brand, but they may very well be fans of the overall field. This is your main advantage – with a generic page, you will now have a group of people interested in your product field. So get that generic page living, generating discussions and content.
However you should consider that Rules for Facebook Page Usernames state: Generic words such as “flowers” or “pizza” are not available as usernames.
The second step would be to create the fan page for your product (Pappa Jay’s). Use that fan page as you normally would, but now you have one more extra channel to market it in – the generic Milk page. Just keep it light – flooding the generic page with Pappa Jay’s will decrease the credibility of the Milk page to zero. You can advertise your own product in the sidebar, or sometimes give away your product as prizes. Just don’t get into the habit of doing it weekly What will you get from it? A well-segmented group of people to market your product to. If people will already like milk, they might be interested in your yoghurt brand as well. Slowly directing them towards your brand is an effective way to go.
This strategy is getting increasingly more difficult to use, at least when your’e trying to make it happen in English – most of the generic fields have already been taken in Facebook (you may reach a deal with the generic page’s owner, though). There is, however, plenty of room for this strategy among smaller languages. So go for it, just keep in mind to have a good product aswell
Recently I posted a article about the possibility of Twitter dying out. I mentioned, that Twitter needs to work on improving itself and this is exaclty what they are doing. Last week I found this graph, that shows the percentidge of spam tweets per day and I’m glad to see, that there has been some remarkable improvements in that area.
You can also help to reduce spam on Twitter:
To help us battle spam, you can click the “report for spam” link on any suspicious profile page. This action alerts us about the account and blocks the account from following or replying to you. If you like, you can also send a tweet to @spam.
Happy Birthday! But does Twitter have what it takes to continue its growth? I have some doubts.
Twitter is not that special anymore. Facebook is replacing so many functions that made Twitter popular in the first place: Most of the socially active people can be followed in Facebook just as easily. You can respond to them privately or publicly and its even easier to share pictures and videos.
Active Twitter users might not be that active inside Twitter after all. You can post 1+ tweets a day, but it does not require your presence anymore. Status updates can be automated, scheduled and links to articles require only few clicks from the blogs. Most of the tweets are links to articles anyway.
Twitter is losing the genuine interaction between users. Twitter is not that exiting to regular people anymore. I hope, that in the future Twitter wouldn’t be just a playground for social media fanatics. To avoid this, Twitter has improve. Here is my selection of Loic Le Meur speculations, that may help to save Twitter from its slow death, IF they will be realized.
Twitter will still be dominant in status updates - it’s the motherboard on which we plug in.
We won’t be updating Twitter all manually
Twitter will replace SMS for millions of people
-it is portable and archives across devices
-you don’t need to remember a phone number
-you are not tied to a mobile operator
Location will be one of the most widespread status update
Talking to shops and restaurants via Twitter will become standard and will get opt in coupons as we enter a shop, based on location
There will be more devices publishing updates than humans WiFi scale, planes, trains, cars all posting updates
Hyper-local news sites with Twitter geotagging feature
Also, Twitter has an enormous potential to be the fastest news channel. Most news will reach Twitter before they reach the News anyway.
Lets cross our fingers and see, what we have to say about Twitter on its 5th anniversary.
Passengers trapped aboard a grounded airliner isn’t something new – in fact it has happened for decades and nobody has seemed to care. People forgot the incident fast, but the reason they were forgotten was that people didn’t have the means to tell the story. Until now. A passenger recording the unpleasant incident and uploading the video on Youtube is a new kind of threat, and a very powerful one indeed.
When Virgin America’s plane had to make an unplanned landing due to weather, passengers were left trapped inside the grounded airplane for hours. David Martin, one of the passengers on plane, decided to record the whole incident and share it with others on his social media account.
After the first announcements of an unplanned landing, he sent out the first messages. Soon after that, he started recording the incident with a cell phone, capturing the growing nervousness even among the flight crew.
His video has been spiraling on the web for five days now, gaining over 70 000 views since uploading. No doubt that it will be a headache for Virgin in months to come, since videos like that will usually stay circulating for a long time. Taking out fires in social media is something they didn’t teach us at school, but it’s certainly something worth knowing now.
In today’s world of ever-expanding social media, a reputation that took years to build, can be destroyed buy the guy in front with a video camera. So paying good attention to your front line will certainly pay dividends in the long run.
TV series and news capture us as we want to have some continuity and consume some familiar stuff every day. This is not new. But in the old media the content, however interesting, was not about us.
Social media is taking the next step. Our friends life feeds contain news and drama that is relevant to us. Familiar, friendly and constantly changing this river of status updates glues us to the social networking sites. What’s more, we can interact and become a part of changing stream and that binds us even stronger.
But what about important things like business, brands, marketing, etc. Well, that is not what people are looking for in the social networking sites. Most of the activity in these sites, most of the social chatter, is just that chatter. Nothing important, just people connecting. It is the background noise of human society. This chatter has been going on forever but only now we are starting to record it. The noise will get even louder as more and more people join in. Additionally we are starting to capture even more of our daily activities until at some point we will be recording our lives nonstop 24 hours a day.
Understanding the social chatter will help companies to see that they have no control. But this will also help the more sensitive ones to find ways how to direct the streams of this force and make it work for them.
So, for the foreseeable future, the sites that help us to connect and get a daily fix of social interaction will be like a pot of honey for us.
But if we approach social design from the perspective of what users are good at, we might be better able to think outside our own box.
Goals and rewards – Consider the kinds of goals you might set within your social application and the rewards that may be earned by users who reach them. These might be personal goals and rewards, like game levels, tasks, challenges, or points. Or social goals and rewards, resulting in status, ranking, visibility, lists, features and spotlighting members.
Moods and feelings – Give expressive users ways in which to communicate their moods and feelings. For example, emoticons and gifts, or icons to be used and exchanged with friends or attached to messages and content. These small gestures, while small, can be curiously compelling.
Knowledge and learning – For users interested in research, information, bookmarking, and more search and browse-related activities, provide ways to share discoveries. Capture those learned moments and make them visible — perhaps surface and validate experts and top contributors.
Giving and receiving – For users who enjoy social transactions provide gifts and a means of passing them around privately and publicly. Gifting is a highly social form of communication, and besides being kind, engages a sense of reciprocity in most of us. So it’s naturally contagious.
Helping and assisting – Some users are just naturally good at paying attention to others, and enjoy helping and assisting those with needs or questions. Design ways to surface these needs and create channels by which helpers can pitch in.
Reviewing, recommending, and rating – Users equipped with opinions and a sense of taste can make valuable reviewers and recommenders. Design ways to capture their contributions as social content. This can be designed then into lists, favorite, trends, news and more.
Asking and answering – In a world of search, there are still many occasions when users want to ask questions and get personal answers. And in a world of search results, there are those who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and help. But questions disappear if they are not captured and paid attention to.
Announcing and sharing – There are users so on top of news that furnishing them with means to announce their discoveries makes for an easy and effective way to keep social content fresh and interaction active. Topical organization, along with trends, help users sort and filter what’s relevant to them.
10 Best Social Media Case Studies. There are many companies have used social media to promote their brand to improve and some of those companies have achieved remarkable success.
Social Media Optimization Case Studies & Tips. Optimizing social media for search engines, presents a tremendous opportunity to grow social networks and build traffic to content that allows visitors to consumer, engage and share.
The 5 types of social currency. The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.
Social Media Complicates Work-Life Balance. Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.
Here is a great resource. You can use the policies and copy them or just read and get insight into what is considered OK and what’s not in social media interaction.
Creating a Facebook fan page for your business or product is quite a common approach today. We create a page for product x and then go on the journey of getting as many people as possible to like our product. A good enough way to get clients, when done right – but you can push it even further.
What will you get from it? A well-segmented group of people to market your product to. If people will already like milk, they might be interested in your yoghurt brand as well. Slowly directing them towards your brand is an effective way to go.
Passengers trapped aboard a grounded airliner isn’t something new – in fact it has happened for decades and nobody has seemed to care. People forgot the incident fast, but the reason they were forgotten was that people didn’t have the means to tell the story. Until now. A passenger recording the unpleasant incident and uploading the video on Youtube is a new kind of threat, and a very powerful one indeed.
TV series and news capture us as we want to have some continuity and consume some familiar stuff every day. This is not new. But in the old media the content, however interesting, was not about us.
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