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Social Media Hacks

Apr. 20 2016 Dealership Tips By Dealer Spike

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By now, you know that a strong social media presence is critical to your business strategy. Your dealership likely already appears on major social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Hopefully, your team has gotten into the habit of posting regularly as well. But are you using each of these channels to their fullest advantage? Are you giving your social media content its best chance for views and engagement? Consider these social media “hacks,” or best practices, for drawing more people in on social media and bringing more attention to your dealership.

According to research from www.MarketingProfs.com, the ideal Facebook post is 80 characters or less – yes, characters including spaces and punctuation. Posts that fall under this limit see 66% more engagement compared to ones that are longer. If you can edit the post down to 40 characters or less that engagement increases to 86% - hard to do, but it’s been proven that people are more likely to react to a post that’s short & sweet.

So, the ideal Facebook post would be something like this –

Maximum Motorsports:

BBQ Saturday – Kick off the summer season & demo our new units 2-4 p.m.

Keep in mind that this post can – and should – include a picture or graphic. People are visual, and seeing an image that corresponds to the information you are sharing will increase the chance that your followers will connect with your content.

Surprisingly, Twitter followers are willing to read more. One hundred characters is the magic number for Tweets:

@MaximumMoto: Check out our skills on the grill this Saturday 2-4 p.m.! Celebrate the summer & demo our new units.

Research found that Google+ headlines that perform the best are 60 characters or fewer, with 200-400 characters in the body of the post.

Maximum Motorsports

Summer Kick-Off BBQ on Saturday, June 18th 2-4 p.m.

ON THE MENU

  • Burgers
  • Hot Dogs
  • Ribs
  • Corn on the Cob
  • Coleslaw
  • Strawberry Shortcake
  • Soft drinks

$8/person for all you can eat! Stack your plate high and check out demos on our latest units in stock. Forecast is calling for 75 degrees & sunny – it’s the perfect way to spend your weekend. Celebrate the summer season with us! Call 555-MOTO for more details.

Blog posts are one channel where you are encouraged to share detailed, lengthy content. Adding a blog or other long-form content to your website is a great way to drive more organic traffic to your site through SEO. The ideal reading length of a blog post is 7 minutes, or about 1,600 words. Google ranks long blog posts higher as they are more likely to provide quality key words and content for search engines. Most web pages that land in the top 10 positions on search engines have at least 2,000 words. A way to turn the social media post examples above into a content-rich blog post would be sharing photos from the event after it is held, along with a breakdown of the day’s events and a detailed description of each unit that was demo’d.

Don’t forget to link & share your blog posts on your social media channels! Make your blog post longer than 1,500 words and see an average of 68% more tweets and 23% more likes on Facebook when it’s shared on social media, compared to shorter posts.

The three biggest tips for creating valuable social media content include –

  1. Write helpful content that is meant to benefit your followers. It’s that simple!
  2. Include images – at least one that is relevant to your content. In blog posts, sharing a handful of images and embedding them throughout your content can help break up large amounts of text and keep readers interested.
  3. Engage with your followers. Reply back to comments that people leave on your posts, or message those people directly if they need information. Keep the conversation going and encourage people to connect with you!

Social media is a great place to earn new business. All it takes is some creativity and time spent working toward your dealership’s online presence. If you need help, Dealer Spike has both Content Writing and Marketing tools available as add-ons to our website packages. Call us at 800.288.5917 or email Sales@DealerSpike.com to get more details.

Thank you to MarketingProfs as a valuable resource for this post.