Offense vs Defense on Dealer Social Media

We all want our cake and we would love to be able to eat it too. That’s not being greedy, necessarily. It’s about being human. As humans, we would love to get the benefits of great and aggressive social media for our dealerships with the expense or time necessary to keep a basic presence, but that simply doesn’t work.

As I wrote on Soshable, there are only two types of automotive social media styles. The article, titled The Two Categories of Social Media Marketing Strategies, details the perspective that you either go all-in with your social media marketing or you stay with a basic approach. Anything in between is going to cost more time and money without yielding any better results than a basic presence.

If you go with the hyper-targeting, advertising-driven mentality of all-in social media, you can improve sales, branding, and overall community involvement at the dealership. If you go with a basic, low-cost social media strategy, you have your social media covered from the pitfalls of a bad presence. With the toe-dipping mentality of getting a little aggressive with social media, perhaps paying a company a few hundred dollars or spending a decent amount of time on it, you have the same results as a low-cost presence – nothing substantial but at least you’re covered.

It’s like offense versus defense. With the offensive strategy, you’re putting your full effort into driving car buyers to your website and getting your message out to the local community. With the defensive strategy, you are making sure that the people who check you out on social media aren’t seeing anything that could discourage them.

It really comes down to this: if you believe that social media can help you sell more cars and you’re willing to invest time, money, or both into the endeavor, do it and go all in with the right strategies in place. If you’re not fully on board with the idea that social media can help you sell or if you don’t have the budget to make it happen today, go with the defensive strategy and keep it all basic.

Social media means different things to different people. While there’s really no “wrong” strategies in common practice today, there are a couple that are a lot more “right” than the others.