Articles

 As a dealer, it’s a legitimate question.

Why bother spending any time or energy on Facebook? For years, I wrote the social media site off as a total waste of time – and for years I was right to do so.

Then, not too long ago, Facebook went public. Things changed. Once you have investors, and a board of directors, you have to engage in the difficult task of making money and showing a profit. That makes you better at what you do in a big picture kind of way, but let’s look at some specifics.

The first ‘why’ is that the biggest demographic group that ride what you sell lives there; it’s where you find them. If you want to catch fish, you have to go where fish are.

The second ‘why’ is because Facebook has done an outstanding job of creating an excellent advertising platform. 

In the spirit of total candor, I used to hate how you advertised within Facebook. Now that money matters, they’ve really stepped up the game. They have a distinct advantage over Google, in the sense that Facebook is what I consider to be a relatively closed-loop universe. 

Once you log into Facebook, they have a wealth of information about you as an individual. Based on your interactions with their platform, they know your gender, age, interests, your friends’ interests, and a lot of other information that allows them to target marketing extremely effectively to you as an individual. It can be a little spooky sometimes.

Google attempted to do this unsuccessfully with G+ partly by pushing you to create a Google account and log in when you got on the internet, and by pushing businesses to create Places pages. They failed spectacularly, and frankly have left a lot of debris in the wake of it with confusion about Google+, Google Places, Google Maps, and Google My Business.  

Conversely, Facebook has seen a pretty smooth evolution that has become more consistently and accurately targeted, with results that have continued to improve over time. At this point, it’s possible to target your market in ways that are many times better than Google. We’ve seen increased (and impressive) success with Facebook when it comes to generating leads that we haven’t seen before. Facebook advertising is truly beginning to come into it’s own.

Third on my ‘why’ list is something I have been preaching for a pretty long time now. Many dealers try to use their websites to convey their dealership’s personality and build the ‘know, like, and trust’ factor with potential customers. This requires constant supervision of content on the site to ensure it is completely current, or you can really look bad. Because of online reviews, and sites like Facebook, people know about you before ever visiting your site in the first place. The job of your website is to identify visitors and generate leads. It’s painfully simple, so don’t overthink it. Keep it clean.

The job of Facebook is to tell the story of your dealership. Create a timeline that shows the personality of your dealership over time, by including pictures of events you host or attend, showing happy customers on new rides, showcasing pictures of your employees, etc. Your timeline will create a story that shows why your dealership is the place to shop in your area.

If handled properly, having a Facebook presence where your client base spends time, with a timeline that is populated with a variety of posts that show why you are the go-to place for fun in your area, and a Facebook marketing plan in place, you’ll see that Facebook can be a place that can generate leads that turns browsers into buyers. 

Talk soon, 

Brad