Navigating the Social Media Highway

Abstract

Social media conversations about your dealership, your cars, your accessories, and your services are taking place constantly online. By leveraging social media, manufacturers and dealers can gain customer insight and understanding how their brand is perceived, extend communication with customers and prospective customers throughout the sales life-cycle, coordinate messages across automotive industry tiers to create more and deeper customer connections and improve the dealer’s appearance in search engines by creating and manage their presence in more digital channels. The automotive industry is clearly in the throes of embracing the curves of the social media highway. Many have learned how, or hired third party companies to, navigate Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Dealer-Rater.com and the proliferation of other social media sites to get their message to the public, reduce their advertising spending, and increase sales. According to the L2 Digital IQ Index, which studies the effectives of social media campaigns, 73% of light vehicle brands maintain at least one Facebook page, 70% have a YouTube channel and 60% use a Twitter account. Car companies are even using social media to launch new vehicles. Social media has been shown to produce a return on investment that entices those in the automotive industry to utilize its marketing power.