Friday, June 5, 2009

Social Networking for Sales-Interview with a real dealer Part #2

Tell me about the different online and social networking avenues you used to promote the dealership?

We're on Twitter, Facebook and You Tube. We also have a very interactive website that has a live chat feature and videos of every pre owned vehicle. Our videos are on YouTube and in a link in all of our vehicle descriptions. People can then access them through cars.com or our website as well.We have close to 800 friends on Facebook. A good tip for other dealers is to hire a service to do an email match on your database. They actually go in to your database and find email address (valid ones!) for many of your customers. You can then just drop the emails into your Facebook account and ask them to be your friend.

I'm also on Twitter for the dealership, posting updates and interesting content for our customers and followers. We have a lot of customers scheduling service appointments and asking questions via our Twitter & Facebook accounts. It's easy for them as they are already on those sites daily and we're able to stay top of mind for them because we're just another one of their "friends."

I feel a lot of online interaction is the customer testing the waters to see if they can trust you. A lot of dealers have tools like live chat on their websites but don't use it correctly. Recently I mystery shopped another dealer and the sales person on the other end of the chat asked me several times for my phone number so he could call me. It isn't about that-it's just about providing the information they need and being helpful and considerate.

A lot of people ask me as a blogger to quantify the sales results I've experienced through social networking, I've always struggled with that. Do you have any way of putting into numbers the success you experience through this marketing? Not really. I can tell you that in May we sold a vehicle to a woman in Florida-she saw one of our vehicle videos online and flew up to purchase and drive home her vehicle. When she got her she said she felt like she already knew us through the video. I also sold a vehicle on Twitter last month. It's one of those things that builds and grows and it literally costs nothing but your time. Take a moment to check out William's Social Media use for Steve White Motors: Steve White Motors Website Steve White Motors Twitter Account Steve White Motors Facebook Page Steve White Motors YouTube

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