Ready to get the jump start on your 2019 automotive social media strategy? Follow these tips and tricks to make the most out of your efforts for the upcoming year!
Plan Ahead for 2019
Before you start sharing, tweeting and reposting content on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, take a breather, connect with your marketing and social media team and hash out a solid three-month, six-month social media plan. The plan doesn’t have to be super detailed, but it needs to include steps such as posting timelines, whether you’ll be sharing content twice or four times a week and what kind of content you’ll be sharing whether that’s two sales posts and one funny meme a week or whatever your team decides. Giving yourself loose, but general and important guidelines are essential if you want to build up your automotive social media.
Engage With Your Followers
Sharing a funny image or a link to your latest sale is great, but don’t forget to share content that will engage your followers. Run a poll on social media, ask your followers to give you feedback. Find ways to let them know your dealership wants to hear their opinions and that their opinions matter. You can also think of other ways to engage your followers by sharing a story about how a new car or a specific car changed someone’s life. People like to see how cars affect lives and not just how much they can save on the latest model or lease. Give them the chance for their voice to be heard and they’ll run with it.
Be Relevant to Your Target Customers
There are many social media platforms available today, but your dealership does not have to be on every single one of them. If you have a three-month plan to promote your new compact SUV to young adults between 21 and 28, then head over to your dealership’s Instagram and start taking stock of your current profile and brainstorm ways to improve and engage with your target customers. Instagram is huge and only growing more popular by the second with the introduction of new features including IGTV that lets users share videos that are up to 60 minutes long.
If your target customers are in their 30s and 40s, then Facebook is the place to be. You can play up each platform’s strengths, for example, you can create a Facebook Ad and zero in on your target customers by age and location, so if you’re a dealership located in Dayton, Ohio, and you want to advertise to men and women between 30 and 48, then you can easily set up a Facebook Ad to target them specifically. It’s all about doing a little customer research to figure out where your target customers are online and finding ways to reach them effectively so that you can actually sell cars on Facebook.
Boost Posts
Another way to engage your automotive social media strategy is by boosting posts and promoting tweets. This comes in handy when you want to run a shorter or an on-going campaign. The only limit is your social media and marketing budget. Boosting posts is a great way for you to reach more customers who don’t already follow you online, but are similar to your current followers. You can position your sale or another campaign in front of these potential new customers and direct them to your website to shop the latest promotion or encourage them to check out your profile for upcoming sales.
Find Your Automotive Social Media Strategy
Finding your automotive social media strategy can be a game of trial and error at first if this is the first time you’re implementing a social media plan, but after a few months of consistently posting and following your plan, you’ll gain the confidence to truly grow your social media following. Try out a few of these techniques and compare your dealership’s social media to where it was before you tried the techniques and after, so you can truly see the difference in your social media growth.
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