How to approach Social Media participation in the world of marketing

            First and foremost when making decisions about how to market your business, where to market your business, and what to market…one has to always consider what’s best for their particular industry and their particular business.  What are your goals?  Who is your target consumer?  If you can answer these things then you can easily find the best social media channel for you.  If you can’t answer these questions, then that’s the first step.

            The example I’ll use yet again will be Modern Toyota, one of the dealerships that I manage marketing and advertising for.  There is a two-pronged approach that I believe is applicable to many businesses.  The first prong is geared towards actually building a social community.  After all, this is exactly why social media was started.  Before the days of ad tools being offered on facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc…. the only thing a business could do was post content to their page.  Based on my experience this is a great strategy to reinforce your brand message, values, services, and content specific to your specific store, brand, or product.  It allows you to create a relationship with your consumers because they can comment, like, share, and review.  In the world of automotive the best social media platforms to drive this strategy are facebook and Instagram.  Both platforms allow the content to be highly visual, add commentary, and link to website pages for more information and detail.  Also facebook has the most users, and even though their biggest user base is 25-34 (Statista), users of all age groups that would buy a car are still there in large numbers.  Plus, facebook and Instagram posts can be linked to hit both properties at once.

            The second prong of this strategy is actual paid advertising.  Utilizing facebook carousel ads, or static image ads provides means of pushing offers, sales, and incentives to in-market shoppers on the same social media platforms that you are filling with more organic content.  It creates an eco-system in which you are present with the shopper along the way.  If we consider the “ideal situation” from Lake in the Week 3 Lesson we end up checking all the boxes:

-       -  You want people to make noise.  We allow and promote this by creating quality engaging organic content they can comment on or share

-       -  You want people to store and share things.  On facebook all posts are shareable, and saveable…the same on Instagram

-       -  You want people to love your website.  All paid ads on both platforms are pushed to relevant content on our website specific to the shopper

And these are just a few of the elements Lake mentions to drive engagement.

            This now leads to the conversation about how to allocate marketing resources to manage this.  For Modern Toyota and all other stores in the network, social media is a huge piece of what we do to stay in front of consumers pre-purchase, during the purchase funnel, and post-purchase (with things like Service, and then on to the next purchase).  All of this activity demands much attention, so we have a full-time Social Media Manager.  This role manages our Reputation on-line, while also creating, editing, and posting organic content.  Across facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google My Business pages we have over 100 accounts.  All of the paid ad strategy on social is managed directly by me with our agencies.  This is due to it being a piece of our total advertising strategy each month.  We drive many impressions every month with our social media, and the vast majority of that is paid traffic, but organic is quite strong given the industry and it grows every month for us.  We also use an agency to manage our Reputation by driving survey participation.  We have considered diving deeper into using things like YouTube, Snapchat, and even Pinterest.  The challenge here is the demand for fresh content.  We are a small team and already have so much to manage.  We could hire an agency to expand, but that becomes very expensive very quickly.  Google My Business is absolutely a necessity since it delivers your business info on the right side of the page organically.  GMB houses you location, phone numbers, hours, images, reviews, specials, and links to your website or even click-to-call.  Facebook and Instagram are linked so one post equals two posts.  Twitter isn’t as much of a necessity, but we use it.  It could be cut from our future strategy given the growing use of Snapchat and our desire to be on Pinterest.  For now, we want to ensure we’re delivering robust, engaging content every day across facebook and Instagram primarily.  If you stretch yourself too thin and cannot do this every day then you become less relevant to your social community and will be less likely to show up in their newsfeed or be followed by them.  We have gone as far as creating a posting calendar so we can look ahead a month at a time and plan content creation.  For example, we have a Throwback Thursday once or twice a month where we post something historical about our company (Modern has been around since 1933 so plenty to share).  This gets you in a rhythm and gives your social community something familiar to look forward to.

            Below are some reports I pulled so you can see the engagement we get on our social media, the metrics we use to see demographics, and volume breakdown of different things.  In the beginning of our strategy this helped us decide what to amplify and what to ignore.  The data drove us to focus on facebook and Instagram.  In January of 2017 we were driving about 500,000 impressions per month with social media (including organic and paid), and now we drive well over 2,000,000 per month.  I should mention this ALL social media for all our 14 stores.  Our best month was 2.6MM impressions in one month.  Anecdotally our Social Media Manager wants to hit 5MM impressions.  Seems like a giant leap, but if we consider an increase in spend and our ongoing growth in organic….who knows, maybe by 2021!

REFERENCES

Author, A. Kaushik (2010). Web Analytics 2.0, The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing\

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. MultichannelMerchant.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

Kallas, P. (2019, July 9). 48 Social Media KPIs You Need to Know (Key Performance Indicators). Retrieved from: https://www.dreamgrow.com/48-social-media-kpis-key-performance-indicators/

Modern Toyota Sprout Social Facebook Analytics Overview report. January 2020. Retrieved from https://app.sproutsocial.com/reports/facebook_performance/overview

Statista. (2019). Most Popular Social Networks Worldwide. Retrieved from: https://www-statista-com.www.libproxy.wvu.edu/study/40227/social-social-media-usage-in-the-united-states-statista-dossier/

Week 3 Lesson: Social Media Analytics & Advertising Channels. Retrived from: https://cas-ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_136005_1&content_id=_6268282_1&framesetWrapped=true