Simply having a business page on Facebook is no longer enough to run a successful automotive marketing campaign on Facebook. With a number of companies and brands joining the bandwagon, Facebook has become a saturated market and unless you understand how the market behaves, you might be get lost amid all the noise.

Similarly, filling up your fans’ walls with advertorial posts will be useless unless you’re receiving a significant amount of responses—in the form of “likes” and “comments”, and high click-through rates for the links that you posted.

Here are some guidelines to improve your posts and be more successful in advertising your automotive dealership on Facebook:

 

Your Post
Your post is the primary metrics that measures how effective your Facebook marketing drive is. Your main objective is that your call to Action is not only catches the attention of your fans, but also to engages them. If your posts are not eliciting some action from your fans, then they may not be doing as much as they could be doing for your auto dealership. Posts that commonly do well have the following characteristics:

1. They must be short and simple. Posts containing 80 characters or less are said to have 27% higher engagement rates than longer posts.
2. They must be clear and direct. Although creative come-ons can sometimes work to your advantage, it’s still much better to go straight to the point of your message.
3. They must solicit a response and engage the reader. Asking questions is the easy way to do this. But ask ‘yes or no’ and ‘who-what-where-when’ type of questions rather than ‘why’ because they are always a lot easier to answer than questions that ask why.
4. They must be relevant and interesting. Social media is often about trends, so it’s important that your posts should not only be about selling or promoting your dealership but also about up-to-date news in the automotive industry; things people will find interesting
5. They must be transparent. If you’re going to post links, try to use the original URL. Many people are wary about clicking shortened URLs, such bitly and tinyurl because they do not know where it will take them, especially with the increasing amount of Facebook viruses out there.

 

Your Timing
A report released by Buddy Media analyzing Facebook Page activities over a two-week period, shows that timing plays a crucial role in the post’s engagement rate. The key thing here is to post when people are more engaged in Facebook than anything else. Suffice to say, non-office hours are the best times of the day and weekends are the best days of the week to post.

The report also indicates that posts during non-office hours receive 20% more responses than those made during office hours. For the automotive industry, Sunday posts have higher engagement rates than any day of the week.

 

Your Strategy
Automotive marketing on a community-based medium such as Facebook involves a healthy and continuous interaction between you (the dealership) and your followers (your current and potential customers). You need be an active part of the community rather than appear like an automated system that churns out posts regarding your inventory on a regular basis. You need to identify when your fans are using Facebook and connect to them when they are more responsive to your posts.