Mix Photos, Text, Videos, and Links on Social Media

We’re all victims of habit. We tend to find routines that make our jobs and lives easier and we latch onto them. It’s not intentional and it’s usually not laziness. It’s a natural flow that comes with being human.

It can happen on social media. At the dealership level, it’s easy to get into a groove and start falling into the trap of repeating what has worked in the past. We might see that a picture we posted was popular on social media and so we start posting more pictures to the point that it becomes overload. We might post a video that doesn’t do well, so we start leaning on the content that performed better. It becomes a habit. It becomes routine.

A proper social media strategy relies on a willingness to keep it fresh and a strategy that mixes it up. Just because links to the dealership’s website don’t perform as well as pictures of classic cars doesn’t mean that we should never post classic cars. If anything, we should take it as a sign that the content on the links we’re posting isn’t very good or it’s not being positioned properly. Lack of results can mean one of two things: we’re doing it wrong and need to improve or we’re doing the wrong thing and we need to eliminate it.

On social media, the right answer is almost always the former. It isn’t that the type of content you’re posting is bad. It’s that the content itself needs to improve.

On a well-managed social media profile, the proper mix of text, video, images, and links will yield the best results if you’re positioning it right. The trap is when you start to get into a routine, a rotation of content types that doesn’t make sense. Social media in general and Facebook in particular is a venue of momentum. When things are rolling well and you’re getting great engagement to your posts, that’s not the time to fall back on the easy engagement posts. You have the momentum. Hit them with a high-value link that can actually drive business.

If the opposite is true where you’re not receiving much engagement, you might want to slow down on the posts that aren’t getting any engagement (usually links) and build your momentum back up through other types of posts.

Social media is a realm of diversity. By taking advantage of the tools and sound strategies at your fingertips, you’ll be walking down an easier path to find success.