There’s a case against Twitter and Pinterest that is being waged by some in the automotive industry. They’ll say that there simply isn’t a good return on investment, that they aren’t worth messing with because it’s just too hard to find a benefit from them. This is true until you look at one major factor: time.

Twitter and Pinterest require very little time to maintain and keep vibrant. Before we get into the ways that dealers can streamline their efforts to make them more suited for a proper ROI, let’s first take a look at the three major aspects of them that make them worthwhile:

1. Time Driven Algorithm – Unlike Facebook and Google+, the Pinterest and Twitter feeds are completely time driven. When you post something, it appears in the feeds of your followers immediately. Over time, they move down. This is a good thing for their purpose because they’re ideal for getting real-time engagement.
2. Communication – At the end of the day, they are great as communication tools. Twitter allows you to communicate with people about ideas and events while Pinterest allows you to communicate visually.
3. Google Loves Them – If there’s one major reason to improve your Twitter and Pinterest posting habits, it’s Google. From a social signals perspective, they are adored.

Now that we have that covered, let’s go over a proper posting and monitoring strategy that can streamline it down so they aren’t a waste of time.

Quick Visit Twice a Day

Three minutes. That’s all it takes to keep a strong Twitter and Pinterest presence. If it helps you sell on car a quarter, it was worth it. If it helps you get your pages indexed and ranked better so that you sell more than one extra car a quarter, you’re seeing better ROI than anything else you could have possibly done.

Log into Twitter. Check for and reply to Direct Messages. Check for and reply to @replies. Post something. It’s 140 characters. It doesn’t take much effort.

Log into Pinterest. Check your recent activity. It will be mostly repins of your posts, but see if there are any comments. Pin or repin something. It’s easy.

That’s it.

Tools

For Twitter, I prefer Buffer. It’s super quick, there’s no need to mess with timing because it uses a queue, and it shortens all of the links for you as you post. The best part is that it can be a Chrome or Firefox plugin which means that you don’t have to visit the app itself. As you’re browsing throughout the day, you can Buffer it very easily.

Regardless of which tool you use, be sure that you keep your queue relatively full. While I don’t recommend planning your Tweets weeks in advance, you can definitely stay ahead of the game so that on days when you simply don’t have the time to mess with it, at least you have content going up.

A quick note about automation – I never recommend feed posting. In other words, setting any RSS feed to autopost, even if it’s your own blog, is a mistake. From sources that you don’t control, feed posts means that your posts aren’t manually vetted. People can tell. It also means that if someone makes a mistake and posts something that is either inappropriate or a mistake, your feed posting program will get it onto your Twitter feed regardless. I remember seeing a car dealer Tweet a post that said something to the effect of “Empire Avenue verification post 2342hkhk!kj32&hh”.

Regarding your own blog, you should be posting it to Twitter manually. It’s your content so you should highlight it appropriately. Use hashtags. Ask for feedback. Make the title more Twitter-appropriate. It bugs me when people auto-feed their own blog posts because it saved them seconds while costing them an opportunity to truly highlight the important content appropriately.

Lastly, don’t feed your Facebook page posts onto Twitter or visa versa. Not everything that goes on Facebook is appropriate for Twitter. More importantly, it simply doesn’t save much time. If you post something to Facebook that also works on Twitter, do it manually. Seconds, folks. That’s all it takes.

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They don’t take much time. There’s simply no reason to not include Twitter and Pinterest into your social media strategy. Done properly, they can enhance more than just your social presence. They can help with your website rankings, your blog traffic, and the general perceptions that people have about your dealership. We didn’t even get into the more advanced ways that you can use these sites to promote your business. At this point, I’d be happy if dealers were simply using them on a regular basis.