There are several different ways that dealers go about using Facebook for marketing. Some use it for branding only. Others use it for business communications only. Sometimes, the best way to go about it is to do both. They compliment each other nicely when it’s done right.

It’s important to understand that you shouldn’t post irrelevant content even if it’s for branding purposes. That always has to be stated because all too often dealers are posting content that has nothing to do with them just to try to fit in and get a lot of likes for their page. This is a bad strategy.

The good news is that there’s plenty of interesting content available that is relevant. There are a few different ways to go about doing that, but one thing that everyone has is their own surroundings. It’s an easy thing to use because every businesses has something interesting, unique, funny, or beautiful in their local area that can be used to highlight the community nature of their social media page. Here’s an example:

This post is an image from the local area by a Honda dealer. There are a couple of things that people might say negatively about this type of post. First, it has nothing to do with business, in this case the business of selling more Hondas. Second, it’s not “branded” properly because there’s no watermark on the image.

Local businesses are part of the local area, which is why this might not have anything to do with selling cars but the people who would care about it (including the 85 who liked the post and the 21 who shared it) are likely locals who appreciate content from their community being shared on social media. As far as the branding complaint, it is branding, not by using a watermark (which can hurt the effectiveness of the post) but because the page itself gets to spread across the local news feeds.

Those who want to use Facebook for more than branding still need posts like this because it sets up the business-relevant posts to perform better. You need content that is universally enjoyed in order to get a boost in Facebook’s news feed algorithm, PageRank. These types of branding posts that are popular can help posts that go up later, such as this review post:

It was able to get some decent traction in a few hours without the use of Facebook advertising because of the quality of posts before it. If this type of content is all that is going up, then the 381 people who saw it would have dropped down to a couple of dozen people. It’s through working with the algorithm that business-relevant posts like this one have an opportunity to be seen. Once we boost it through advertising, it will get even more exposure.

All-branding or all-business are the wrong strategies for most. It’s a cool combination of the two that yields the best results. When done properly, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.