The Next Generation of Social Media for Car Dealers

The automotive industry has been notorious for two things when it comes to emerging technology: they are often late to the game when it comes to adoption and they accelerate ahead of other industries once they actually accept it. The internet itself saw this as many dealers were neglectful of their web presence in the early 2000’s when most businesses were pushing, but once they took note and realized that the industry was changed forever as a result, they took to it with a passion.

The same seems to be true for social media. One of the first automotive social media services that emerged in 2007 saw an astounding 1% adoption rate from the company’s own clients. It wasn’t just hard to take it out to the rest of the market. Even those who were already doing business with them found that selling an affordable product that nobody understood wasn’t very easy.

Fast forward to 2013 and now 2014. The industry has changed. All OEMs and most dealerships have put time, effort, and money into their social media presence. The challenge that now faces them is that they’ve taken the step to go from bad to good. Now they have to take the giant leap to go from good to outstanding, a contention made by automotive social media firm Dealer Authority. The idea is this: going from bad to good doesn’t change results. Even a good presence isn’t good enough to move the needle and actually help dealerships sell more cars.

General Motors learned this the hard way when they dumped Facebook advertising just prior to their IPO, only to come back a year later when they realized that the medium actually was working for them.

Here’s the video from Dealer Authority that details their thoughts: