Social Media Mistakes Your Auto Dealership Should Avoid
1. Posting Rarely
This one is quite obvious, but it certainly needs to be highlighted, considering the number of auto dealerships that don’t follow it. It is quite important that your car dealership maintains its social media profiles actively.
Even if the reach of organic content has been declining for a while, your social channels need to be alive and up to date. Social networks are some of the first places that prospective car buyers visit to research their new vehicles.
If your social profiles haven’t been updated in a while, these potential customers will almost certainly move on to a different dealer.
It is tough to put a number to the social posts that your car dealership should be publishing. A couple of Facebook posts on a daily basis will provide enough opportunity for engagement without annoying your target audience.
What’s more important is to create high quality posts than to post too often.
2. Not Responding to Chat
A steadily increasing number of potential customers prefer to communicate with dealers on chat than over email or phone. Online shoppers today expect customer service that is quick and efficient. They do not like being made to wait for a response. Social networks such as Facebook even list the speed with which businesses respond to user queries.
If potential customers have questions about the vehicles in your inventory, they would like to get an answer as soon as possible. They would obviously be displeased if they are put on hold for long.
A full day is quite a long time for a customer to wait just to get an answer. By the time the dealership gets around to replying, they would most likely have received responses from rival dealerships and moved on to them.
3. Promoting Robotic Content
By promoting posts and reviews of your car dealer website in an impersonal way using automated posting, the social feed of your dealership will end up looking bland, robotic and boring.
While we completely agree that tools that automate and streamline the management of your social media channels can save you loads of time, it should certainly not come at the expense of reducing the personal and human feel of your website.
Ensure that all of your uploaded posts, especially those that you chose to publish through automated channels, maintain your brand’s image.
4. Publishing Irrelevant Posts
While it is a great idea to publish a wide variety of content to keep your followers interested and spark new conversations, there should be rhyme and reason to all that you publish on your social channels. It certainly doesn’t have to be only about cars all the time.
However, do keep in mind that if someone decides to follow your auto dealership online, they obviously are interested in your cars or your brand, or maybe even the automotive industry in general.
If you flood their news feed with content that they don’t care about too often, they are likely to hit the un-follow button without hesitation.
5. Using Low Quality Images or None at All
Research has shown that the average online consumer has an attention span of less than 10 seconds. This means that your car dealer website has barely any time to engage a user before they decide to move on to something else.
This tells you why images are important tools in enabling you to grab and keep a viewer’s attention.
In addition to making the online channels of your auto dealership more attractive and memorable, uploading posts that contain images encourage increased engagement as well. Tweets with pictures were retweeted 150% more than those without any images, and that is a staggering amount.
Since images are so important, take time and put in resources to ensure that the images you use on your social channels are clear, crisp, and striking. With brilliant smartphone cameras and great photo editing apps that can be installed free of cost, there really is no excuse for your social media channels to not put up images that look fantastic.
For more information on social media marketing tips for your auto dealership, Contact Us.