Most review sites make it really easy to share reviews on Facebook and other social media sites. For Twitter and Google+, this is fine. With Facebook, dealers face algorithmic challenges when they post with these tools directly. The algorithm simply does not like links posted through these sites. In essence, doing so makes your posts invisible.
They usually get ignored. With Google and websites, most dealers never pay too close attention to the way their businesses are listed on the hundreds of directories on the web. That's not how people find your information anymore so the…
Reviews are becoming harder to get for some sites. Yelp, Google+, and others are tightening up the way that they allow reviews to be visible. Just because someone reviews your dealership doesn’t necessarily mean that the sites are going to allow those reviews to be visible.
Arguably the biggest reason that our partners at Dealer Authority initially wanted to acquire a stake of eReputationBuilder to form Dealer Influence was because there's a huge gap between what the reputation segment of the automotive industry is today and…
You probably have a widget on some of your social media accounts that lists your inventory. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong.
The reality is that very few (if any) people actually click through to the tabs on your social media pages. In fact, very few even look at your social media pages at all. On Facebook, for example, the vast majority of the action that happens with your page happens through the news feeds of individual users. They aren’t clicking through to your profile. If they see your posts in their news feed, they can interact with them in some way, but they aren’t going to visit your page.
The majority of traffic that goes to the actual social media pages comes from either links on your website or search engines when people do a search for the dealership by name. They aren’t getting there naturally. As a result, they’re not there to look at your inventory.
It’s really easy to sit back and assume that social media is a function of creativity. That makes it easy to dismiss; it can’t be important if it’s all about fun and poking, right?
The reality is that social media is a function of data. It always has been, even if the social sites themselves didn’t realize it at first. That’s where the real value in social media lies. The data that the sites both collect as well as procure offer the real value to car dealers wanting to take advantage of social media. If used right, the data can guide your content rather than the other way around.
The biggest problem that most dealers and even marketers face is that there is simply so much data available on these sites that it’s hard to isolate it. Keep in mind, by “hard”, I’m not saying that isolating the right data is difficult as an action. The most difficult part is having the willingness to take hold of the bits and pieces of the most useful data rather than trying to take advantage of all of it. When you try to go for too much, you end up with less.
Have you ever been on your smartphone browsing Facebook or Twitter, clicked on a link, and were taken to a page on a website that didn’t render properly on your device? Even worse, have you ever clicked on a link thinking that you were going to be getting content only to find that you were redirected to the homepage of the website?
Welcome to 2012. The way that technology has been advancing, one would think that websites and companies would have social and mobile figured out by now, but there are too many out there that do not have a clue. Yes, they’re still three years behind and many of them are showing no signs of modernizing, particularly in the automotive industry.
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.