What is the goal of your brand’s social media pages? The thing most automotive dealerships might say would be ‘getting our message out there.’ The easiest way to do that would be to get likes, shares, views, etc, and to do that you must give them premium content that they’ll want to share with their friends!

Acquity Group conducted a study of people ages 18-69+ to get a feel for their social habits. Some of the results are shocking while some are expected but all of them are insightful for marketers. Let us take you through some of the most riveting results.

First of all, this study brought some good and bad news for brands. The good news? Facebook is the most trusted channel for brand content. The other choices included Newspaper, Instagram, YouTube and TV among others. The least trusted, as you can see, was a company blog, which was a surprise for us. Here at iFrog Digital Marketing, we write content for our client’s blogs and we try to make them as trustworthy and informative as possible in hopes that we are seen as the authority on that topic.

The study also proved something we may or may not have already known: young people are easily influenced. The numbers show that of people 50 years and younger, 43.68% of them have tried a new product or service as a result of an advertisement on social media. That is a very impressionable group and one that many auto dealerships choose to target. You can probably see the opportunity there, but if not then picture this: Our iFrog Graphics Department creates you a brilliant Facebook ad of a new car or service special for your dealership, our content writers give it a gripping headline and caption, we post it on your dealership’s page and nearly 50% of people purchase that car or service. Now a 50% return on investment (ROI) would be ridiculous, and while that is an exaggeration, it is still a good representation of how the process works with Facebook ads created by iFrog. Just as a side note, this study showed that YouTube ads affect the buying habits of the 18-22 year old demographic the most at 27.51%.

Videos shared on a friend or family member’s wall were far and away the most shared content at over 75%. How do you get your dealership’s content shared on that original family members wall? Give them something useful, informative or even funny. That first share is what could enable your post to snowball into something that gets a much wider reach. We’ve seen that first hand for our Preston Auto Group clients with their King of the Plex competition videos in September. This is a funny video which quickly snowballed to reach over 5,000 people and 20+ shares.

The study also showed that a post by a brand that has been shared multiple times in my network was shared at a rate 46.44%. People feel comfortable sharing something that someone else has already shared. This goes along with the same notion that supports clothing trends: once you get one person or group to do it the rest will follow. Some disappointing news for brands was the dismal 4.91% of people in the study that said they would share a post by a favorite brand. Meaning that even if Mazda is their absolute favorite car brand they won’t share a post from a Mazda Dealer over 95% of the time. This statistic is disheartening, but that just means brands have to try harder to earn that elusive “share”.

Finally, we would like to leave you with another graph illustrating more findings of the study. Notice that a funny video is the most likely piece of content to get shared. Another client that is doing great with their funny videos — and they’re doing it completely on their own — is Boulevard Ford, part of the Preston Auto Group. Check out their daily videos that are getting great traction on social media, such as this Automotive Edition of Bat Dad. The fact is funny videos may not directly sell your product but they may sell the experience. An article revealing new findings in an industry you’re interested in had a great share rate as well, which is what we aim to do through our iFrog Blog and client’s blogs.

Take this information and use it in your social media execution. Or you could get in contact with iFrog about optimizing your digital media for you! Either way, follow these best practices and your content shall be shared.

Source: Acquity Group’s 2015 Next Generation of Commerce Study as interpreted by adweek.com