People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
Many car dealers have created or have thought about creating a Facebook Business page for their dealership due to the social network having one billion users and three billion likes and comments generated daily. Facebook is where people like to share, explore, and connect, which ultimately makes it the perfect place for car dealers to engage with potential buyers.
I have the honor and privilege of participating in two batches of automotive social media seminars in Orlando this year. One, the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp, will be more of a training-class setting that includes 5 trainers offering their insights for nearly 4 hours each on different aspects of marketing. I am doing the classes on social media itself.
Even though 4 hours seems to be a long time, believe it or not you could double that time and still have more to cover in the realm of social media for car dealers. The opportunities are endless, the risks are many, but regardless of what a dealer does or doesn’t want to do in social media, they need to understand that having a presence in some form or fashion is required, even if just as a defensive stance against those who would go after their name.
This event is not for those people. It’s for people who are ready to take their marketing to the next level. Hands-on, extremely informative, with small classroom settings geared to give everyone a one-on-one feel and to be able to take away tremendous value from the event.
During the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans last week, two things were apparent:
The only problem is that, while social media is viable for most businesses out there, it seems to have eluded car dealers and other automotive-related companies. There are hundreds of dealers and dealership employees who have created Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts. There are dozens of vendors who are attempting (usually in vain) to use social news sites for traffic and SEO reasons. Blogs are buzzing and popping up left and right.
For all intents and purposes, they’re doing it wrong. [Read more...]
The automotive industry has always been notorious for being a year or two behind the rest of the world when it comes to the internet. When other industries such as real estate and e-commerce were starting to get onto the Internet, car dealerships held out as long as they could.
When websites started getting more intricate and interactive, car dealers started throwing up online billboards. Search Engine Optimization started becoming a necessity around 2004 around the time that equipment leasing hit it big on the Internet. In the car business, it really became popular this year.
Web 2.0 has been a part of most industries for a couple of years now. Web 3.0 is just around the corner. Yet, the automotive industry still hasn’t quite embraced the social aspects of the Internet…
…until now. [Read more...]
