Ok, I must start with an apology for a slightly misleading title. Even the most popular car dealerships will struggle to tell you how many clients they'd found on social media. One thing is for sure, though – car manufacturers and dealerships are increasing activity on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels and there must be a good reason for them to do so. With more than a billion people using social media actively, the likelihood of you encountering a potential buyer on one of your social media channels is higher than ever. By not being there you simply waste an opportunity.

I recently did a study on how car manufacturers approach social media: http://www.creditplus.co.uk/blog/winners-losers-car-manufacturers-m.... What I found was that many car sellers still don't know how to approach this new marketing channel properly. The biggest mistake I've seen is manufacturers posting updates that are only likely to interest themselves. A thing to remember is that the updates should be written with your potential customer in mind. Thus the first thing to do is to try to understand what your typical customer likes.

If you're looking at a few car dealerships with a good number of Facebook “likes”, you realize that the number is not most important thing.

For example, https://www.facebook.com/HondaCarsOfKaty – scroll down to the posts and you'll see that each post receives only 3 – 5 interactions (shares or likes). For an account with 6,000+ followers, this is a really poor result. Why is this happening? Firstly, the followers are not engaged, they're not interested in what this company has to offer. Secondly, the posts are usually irrelevant to cars.

A good example is https://www.facebook.com/freewayhonda – they've got only half of the followers of Katy, but their posts are better targeted, they're using large and engaging images and you can see that despite the lower number of likes, they get between 10 to 70 interactions on every post.

Finally, https://www.facebook.com/BMWofMinnetonka – they're still growing and with 1,700 likes they can't expect more than 3 – 20 interactions per post, however, this car dealership is doing all the right things – they're posting engaging content and they've developed a Facebook app that lets them share their current vehicle inventory with their followers. A very clever idea.

Who is going to do it?

Because most auto dealerships have had to lay people off during the recession, the main question is who is going to dedicate their time to actually go and post on Facebook and Twitter. Especially as these activities don't directly impact the car sales and you can't measure ROI, many managers decide simply not to bother. This is probably the wrong decision because your competitors are currently using Facebook to their advantage while you're sitting on the fence and watching.

Those dealerships that decide to work on their social presence, often do it the wrong way by giving it a half-hearted attempt. Social engagement must be a well planned-out and consistent effort. If you do it today and tomorrow and then forget about it for a week or so, you'll never build the following that your car business need to succeed in social media.

The dealers who decide to give it a go, often have no other option but to elect the manager to take on the responsibility of posting updates. Depending on the involvement of the manager, this might prove to be a disadvantage. Being out on the car lot and actively selling, you encounter interesting people and situations that will inevitably lead to anecdotes that you can quickly turn into social media updates.

Somebody said something funny about a particular car? A client told you a story that got you hooked? Had a nightmare test drive? Post about it – it's all stuff that people want to hear and share with their own followers.

If a car dealership uses an office-bound person to do their social stuff, or even worse – outsource it to an agency that knows nothing about the day-to-day running of car sales, you'll end up with those boring tweets and updates like:

Took delivery of a new Chrysler, click here now.

Who is going to want to click on it or share it? You're right – nobody! I think the solution is simple. Everyone has got a smartphone these days. Set up your social networks on your car salesmen smartphones and instruct them to tweet out every time they encounter something cool. If you're too aware of your public image, you might create a short and simple document outlining what you don't want the salesmen to share on your socmed channels.