By Jonathan Barber
Social media
It’s a fantastic way to engage directly with your followers at no cost to you. When your followers feel connected to your brand, they’re more likely to refer friends and less likely to check out competitors. See the power of social media? Much like email marketing, the most important thing about social media is that you’re on your customers mind when they see your posts. When a headlight goes out, or a carburetor needs to be replaced you’ll be the first person that your customer thinks of.
What do you go on social media for? Most people will answer with the following motivations.
- To find or share content
- To stay in touch with what their friends are doing
- To stay up to date with current events
- To fill up spare time
Keep these things in mind when you’re posting on social media. Although some people are looking to research or find products to buy, most people on social media are there to connect and enjoy content.
What social media sites?
For automotive shops, we’d suggest that you stay on Facebook and Instagram. These are the two platforms where we’ve seen the most engagement for automotive shops.
Create an Instagram page. Update it weekly with photos of the cars that you’ve worked on. If you don’t work on exciting cars, try and document the work process. People enjoy looking at before and afters, its satisfying isn’t it! Be sure to hashtag each picture with relevant hashtags. Hashtags allow a wider audience than your followers on Instagram to view your posts. So for example if you were posting about a mustang Gt500 that you rebuilt, what you’d do is hashtag those photos as #salvagerebuild. There are people on Instagram who enjoy seeing cars get rebuilt and will actively follow the #salvagerebuild hashtag, so even if they aren’t following you they will see your content. Type your hashtag into the Instagram search bar
Facebook is where you’ll find the majority of your audience, you’ll also find that a good amount of your reviews will be posted on Facebook. You’ll be reposting your posts from Instagram to Facebook to save you time. Don’t be concerned about posting too much, your customers won’t mind. If you have a post that is performing better than usual give it a boost for $5-10.
Google My Business
Post the same posts that you post on Instagram and Facebook on your Google My Business Page. The reason why you’ll want to be posting here is Google will reward you for being active on your GMB by increasing your ranking a bit, so it’s worth it to post here. Unfortunately posts only last a week, but this is about how often you’ll be posting anyways.
“Much like email marketing, the most important thing about social media is that you’re on your customers mind when they see your posts. When a headlight goes out, or a carburetor needs to be replaced you’ll be the first person that your customer thinks of.”
Auto likers
There’s no magic bullet to get 10,000 followers on Instagram, but you can do a couple of things that can help speed up the process. Use an automation bot like Everliker to follow and like and comment on relevant photos. Everliker will use hashtags to find the most relevant content to like. For example, if you’re targeting people who like cars in Chicago, find a hashtag like #chicagocars and have the bot engage with that hashtag. The people who have posted the content will notice that you’ve liked it and check out your page and/or follow you.
Social Signals
Let’s think back to our local SEO chapter where we talked about local SEO and how it can drive interested ready to buy local customers. Well guess what, social signals can help you get more visits on your Google My Business Page. This can help you rank higher than your competitors in local search. So what’s going on behind the scenes is Google’s algorithm rewards you for being active on social media, and what you want to do in response to that is post as often as possible.