The Dealerist's Blog helping dealers get the most out of social media

Spring 2010 looks to be huge, is your dealership ready?

Marketing and advertising your dealership has gone from mass channels such as radio and TV to a more personal and on demand approach.  Instead of repeating a broad message, today you need smaller more people centric messages.  It’s not that marketing your dealership has died, it’s just changed.  Today people have more power and more choices.  So what’s the best way to reach them?    

Be Accessible.

Whether it’s your website, your Facebook page, Twitter or You Tube or any other number of sites, there are more ways to reach more people than ever before.  Can your prospects and customers engage you on multiple platforms?  Some people prefer to submit a form, others prefer to call, many still use email and an increasing number would rather use Facebook or other social media sites.  The lesson here is simple don’t limit access to your dealership to your website and phone.    

Be Active.

You don’t have to sit at your desk and post Tweets all day.  However, do post something regularly.  I would suggest at least three to five times a week.  More importantly set up alerts to notify you when your dealership is mentioned.      

Short and Sweet.

Because of all the ways to reach people today, this is more important today than ever before.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to send a long email or posts on your social media sites.  Use just 10% of your message at a time, so if you want tell prospects about a car and your description is 500 words send to them in 50 word increments.   Brevity is king, when people see long email messages they tend to put off reading it.

In closing this is an exciting time to be in the car business.  A lot of people have been waiting to buy that new car, waiting for the economy to settle down, waiting for credit to open back up.  This spring should be one of the best in a long time.  Now is the time to make sure that your dealership is ready.  Feel free to call me if you have any questions on how you can put Social Media and your website to work for you.