Social Media for Dealers

A resource from HuebnerPetersen's Dealer Marketing Services

Facebook events.

Whether you’re having your annual open house or throwing a BBQ to kickoff the summer camping season, making sure your RV customers know that your upcoming event is important. An easy way to announce your event is though Facebook Events. This Facebook feature makes it easy to share events, invite people to events, and track participation.

If you have a Facebook Page for your RV dealership, make a note to start using Facebook Events to let people know what’s going on at your dealership, it’s easy!

You can start a Facebook Event simply by using the status bar on your Facebook business page. The event option will be the third icon in from the left – the small calendar button.

Where you can start your dealership's event posts

Once you click on the icon a screen will appear allowing you to start filling out some of your event details:

Fill in all your event details on Facebook

You can enter in the title of your event, details on where the event will take place, and of course, the date and time of the event.

Be sure to enter in a caption in the status bar above to really draw attention.  This could be something along the lines of “The summer camping season is here, come down this Saturday for a BBQ and check out all of our great units”.  After filling in all of the details your event will show up on your Facebook page.

What your Facebook event will look like

By setting up your event in the status bar you’re only entering in the basic details. If you want to provide more detailed information on your event (like an event photo) you’ll need to click on the bolded event title to reach a screen that looks like this:

Customize your Facebook event

In the right hand menu you’ll see an option to “edit” your event. You can change, edit and add details, customize your description, add a picture and start inviting people to attend.

As an added bonus you can allow people to write memos and post photos on your wall to really make your event interactive.

Check out the other posts in this series:

Facebook Links

Facebook Pictures

Filed under: Facebook, The Basics, , , , , , , , , ,

Facebook Fan Pages – A place customers want to be.

Facebook fan pages are popping up left and right, so what will you do to make your Facebook fan page somewhere your customers want to join? Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media outlines ways to build your fan page so that your customers want to be there. Click the link below to learn more:

http://bit.ly/aBJYGy

Our Top Three Takeaways:

  1. Offer content on your fan page that your customers can’t get anywhere else. Make is specialized to you and your RV dealership and give them a reason to keep coming back.
  2. Interact with your customers…talk to them! That’s all too easy to forget!
  3. Find what your customers are passionate about and focus on it! It should be easy to find a facet of RVing or travel that really connects with your customer base!

Filed under: Facebook, , , , ,

Quick Facebook Tip

Here’s a quick and easy Facebook feature that will help you make it convenient for customers to fan your dealership on Facebook:

One of the more interesting recent developments with Facebook Pages is the ability to let customers become fans of you with a text message.  The way this works is that customers text message the name of your business to Facebook’s short code (FBOOK – 32665).  That means you can include this prompt in all of your offline marketing, whether it’s business cards, signage, flyers, a TV commercial, or just a casual conversation with someone.  It has powerful immediacy, versus simply promoting the URL of your page.

Check on the entire article “Why Your Business Needs to Be on Facebook” written by Adam Ostrow here (article originally posted in the AmEx’s Open Forum on 6/22/09).

Filed under: Facebook, Quick Tips, , , , , , , ,

Return on Investment

Is the time you put into building up social media for your dealership really worth it?  If you go about it correctly, and you invest the time and energy, you’ll most likely find a return on your investment.  Check out this quick video presentation “Social Media ROI: Socialnomics” (video from author of the book Socialnomics, Erik Qualman):

Social media can have a huge impact on your business. Social media is cost effective and can positively impact many facets of your dealership. It can increase customer contact, optimize your customer service, advance your systems, strengthen customer relationships, and increase sales.  BUT, just like anything else, you get out of it, what you put into it.

More info on the brands/companies mentioned in the video:

BlendTec: Will it Blend?

Naked Pizza: @NAKEDPIZZA, Naked Pizza on Facebook

Gary Vaynerchuk: @garyvee, Wine Library TV, Crush It!

Ford’s Social Media: Ford on Twitter, Ford on Facebook, Ford on Flickr, Ford on YouTube

Filed under: Strategy, The Basics, , , , , , , , , , ,

3 oft-overlooked ways to optimize Facebook

Get a Facebook page.

It sounds so easy, and it is.  Getting a page is no sweat, but then what?  We get this question quite often.  How do you make the most of your Facebook page?  There are tons and tons of different ways to “optimize” your dealership’s Facebook page, you just have to know them!  Here are three easy ways (easy, and so often skipped over) to increase the impact of your Facebook page.

1.  Make sure to invite your friends

How do you get fans for your dealership’s page?  You publicize your page to everyone you’re friends with on Facebook!  Invite your friends to be fans and if they accept, you’re page will show up in their new stream, so your friends’ friends will be exposed to your fan page.  The more exposure your page gets, the more fans you amass!

It’s easy to invite your friends. On your business page, under your logo area, click on “Suggest to Friends”

How to Suggest to Friends

A listing of all of your personal Facebook friends will come up; you can select everyone or just a few and then send them invitations to become fans.  Super easy, you will be adding fans in no time!

2.   Setup your unique Facebook URL

When you sign up and get your Facebook business page, you automatically get a crazy URL, something like http://www.facebook.com/Uakda838248973/Cincinnati-djeus

That nonsense doesn’t tell anybody what your page is about.  BUT, once you’ve accumulated 100 fans, you can change your URL.

As soon as you hit 40 fans, visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click on “Set a username for your Pages”.  Here you can select your own username.  Go with something that advertises your dealership (like facebook.com/anynamerv).  Now you can use this URL in a variety of places and easily direct people you meet to your Facebook page.

3.  Post pictures

Nothing makes a Facebook page dynamic like images.  There are unique Facebook apps that can be added to your page to make adding images slick and easy!  One of our favorites, the Flickr app.  If you use Flickr click here to find the Facebook Flickr app.  This will allow you to seamlessly integrate your new Flickr uploads with your Facebook page.  If you do not currently use Flickr, learn more about Flickr here…it has great potential as a social tool for RV dealerships!

There are plenty more ways to optimize your dealerships Facebook page, and we’ll be sure to write about them soon — BUT, if you haven’t covered the three items we discussed today, that’s a great place to start!

Filed under: Facebook, Quick Tips, The Basics, , , , , ,

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This information is brought to you by HuebnerPetersen's Dealer Marketing Services and Front Lines Marketing Programs. Please visit http://HuebnerPetersen.com for further information.

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