by Kaitlyn Bender, Reputation Management Specialist By this point, we all know that the Google+ platform is ever-changing. So last week's updates should come as no surprise. We've done our best to break down the recent changes and highlight the most important features that will affect your dealership's third party business listing.Read post

Pinterest is making some radical changes with regards to how their products are displayed and all of the information consumers need about them as well. They have clearly proven their image based grid layout is a huge favorite with consumers - page views, time spent on site, sharing and conversions leave everyone elese in the dust. Read post

Understanding tomorrow's car buyers and their behaviors is becoming increasingly easier by simply diving into their activities and habits. Smartphone adoption is at an incredible penetration level currently with 25% of teens saying they access the Internet mostly from their phones This penetration will continue to grow. Read post

What is important to your business when using social networks? Is a question many companies should be asking every time they log onto their social sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. Understanding what the purpose is for using these sites is vital in knowing the types of content your business will produce and share on them, as well as, what your company hopes to gain from using them. For most businesses, the answer would be to connect, engage, and build reciprocal relationships with the right people, but finding the right people for your business is not always easy and usually takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish. Many companies have begun using sites that measure social influence, such as, Klout and Kred to discover their best customers and brand evangelists; however, besides a Klout or Kred score there isn’t much else to go on. Little Bird, currently in private Beta, offers much more than the current social influence measuring sites, in that it analyzes data and ...Read post

Take a look at those familiar little icons in the top right corner of the screenshot above. Four of the primary social media sites’ logos adorn a prominent position on the homepage. It’s not an uncommon sight. Some put them at the top. Other put them at the bottom. Some make them large and prominent. Others make them small and subtle. One way or another, most dealerships put them somewhere. They do it for a reason. The reason is presence. We’ve all heard about the potential of social media but few local businesses and car dealers in particular have found the level of success that they would like. Finding that success is not the topic of this particular article (important though it is). Instead, we’re going to gain an understanding of the importance of social media outside of the obvious. We all know that Facebook, Twitter, and the other networks have the potential to drive business when done right. Some would say that the effort and cost are too high, that...Read post

As customers continue to migrate towards mobile, the opportunity to generate and convert leads also migrates. Customers who once submitted leads via your desktop site are now shopping from their smartphones. If your mobile presence does not offer the speed, ease of use, and call to action, you very well may be losing a large percentage of these customers. It's critical for dealerships to explore their options for a polished mobile platform the same way they shop for a desktop website or CRM. http://www.carpursuit.com/learn/article/are-you-seeing-a-drop-in-internet-automotive-leads ...Read post

As the founder and CEO of CarGurus, I wanted to clear up some confusion that seems to have arisen about how CarGurus operates and how we deliver value to dealers. Read post

I’m not a broken record, at least I’m not trying to be. It seems that I’ve covered this topic from different angles a lot lately, but it’s simply that important to understand. In business in general and in automotive marketing in particular, getting more Facebook fans is a very low priority compared to reaching more people. This seems to be counter-intuitive. One might argue that getting more fans on Facebook is the way to reach more people, but they dynamics of the social network make it to where this isn’t the case. A page can be extremely successful and reach the masses with very few fans. Conversely, a page with hundreds of thousands of fans can reach next to nobody. It’s a challenging concept to understand until you get down into the way the Facebook algorithm works. In essence, it’s not size but quality that counts the most on Facebook. Just because someone likes your page doesn’t mean that they’re going to see any of your...Read post