8 Tips For Social Business

Your dealership needs to a structured methodology for the core operational elements. You have teams in place for managing the website, the marketing, the BDC, the sales teams, etc. So why don’t you have a plan in place for the social element of your business as well?

52% of managers confirm the importance of social activities within their business today while 82% agree with it’s importance over the next three years as well. Download the complete HootSuite Social Report – below is a quick overview:

“The conversation is happening about your brand whether or not you’re part of it or not.”  – Seth Godin

1. Evaluate: Figure out what you already have in place and what is needed to move forward. Do you have budget available for additional tools and resources or will the efforts come from within the dealership? Who are the right people for the job; who will lead the efforts? the ultimate goal should be the creation of a healthy digital culture that contributes to digital word of mouth, social engagement and eventually contributing to the traffic building efforts of your website.
2. Organize: How will your team(s) be organized? will you adopt a centralized strategy or empower staff at the store level to own the efforts? Either solution should enable to the easy flow of content and social activities among your locations, encourage consistent interaction and also scale easily based on employee turnover and dealership growth.
3. Listen & Learn: This should be a key principal of your social efforts. Just as your staff must listen to the customer in real life, your digital team needs to listen what people are saying about you online. Getting the feedback is rather simple, improving the organization based on this information is the difficult part.
4. Engage to Build Community: Your dealership culture needs to look beyond “waiting for the next up” and should be trying to build a community around the brand. Each social channel has the ability to help build this community: Twitter followers and lists, Facebook likes, Blog and newsletter subscribers, LinkedIn company page followers, Google+ circles, your dealership’s mobile app – these users are there for specific reason, cater to their individual needs within these channels to build trust via valuable content and communication.
5. Collaborate: Your social team should share their activities and insights with the entire dealership. Provide examples of your Facebook insights or Google analytics reports to proivide physical proof of the benefits the dealership seeing from these efforts. Getting 100% buying is critical to your success.
6. Create Secure Profiles: Don’t let the embarrassment of personal message cross the streams with your company accounts.(In this report, HootSuite provides this functionality within it’s user profiles.)
7. Measure ROI: This is probably the first question you’ll have to field from these efforts, so head it off at the pass with a plan to measure. Track all of the marketing and lead qualified activities such as likes, followers, mentions list building items, tracking URL’s, referral traffic and CRM lead sources to dive deeper into these efforts and their contributions over time.
8. Amplify: What are you doing to make your digital footprint is a large as possible? Build an arsenal of organic content and paid social efforts to maximize your exposure – while measuring this activity to determine how much activity and traffic you can drive from these efforts.

How many of these items do you have in place for your dealership’s social efforts?