When you want to get some pretty good data on using social media for marketing, one of the best people to turn to is Dan Zarrella, Hubspot's social media scientist. "Mad scientist" may be a better phrase for him, but he's crazy like a fox when it comes to Twitter.

This latest round of insights comes in the form of how to get retweets. Size is important as can be seen in the graph above. What's the right size? 100-115 characters appears to be the sweet spot. This can be attributed to a few things. First, longer Tweets can be retweeted the standard way, but when they're manually retweeted (such as "RT @0boy...) then the longer Tweets can't work as well. More importantly, people know that they will not be as easily able to be retweeted themselves if the Tweet is too long.

Another reason for this is quality of content. With the limited space in Twitter, it's hard to say things that are profound, funny, or generally retweet-worthy until you get into the longer format.

Lastly, tweets of this range seem to look better. They may or may not include a link. Whether they do or do not, they appear very nicely in Twitter apps and in the stream in a way that is psychologically appealing. It may sound simplistic, but shorter tweets seem too short and longer tweets turn people off for the reason given above.

At any rate, this data is compiled from a data set of 1.4 million randomly selected Tweets. It's as comprehensive as they come. One thing that should be noted: the length of the Tweet is infinitely less important than the engagement of the account itself. If nobody's listening to you, no measure of science is going to get you more retweets.

I had one of the most exciting things ever happen to me professionally around this time last year. I recall it specifically because I remember Halloween being in the air when the news came around. My company wanted me to build a social media solution that took everything that I had learned outside of automotive and brought it into our industry.

This alone was not exciting. The key was that I had told them that the only way I would do it is if they understood that this required extreme levels of manual effort, that automation was completely out of the question, that it would be nothing like anything else in the industry, and that it would probably be very expensive. The agreed to the rules. That was the exciting part.

Fast forward to today and 99% of what I had predicted had come true. Everything's flowing nicely. Clients are happy. Nobody has cancelled in a year. Things are grand. There's a sad part to this story, the part that makes it important for dealers to understand.

When considering how to take this type of a product as-is to an OEM, I'm completely stumped. Manual effort works fine for hundreds of clients, but what would happen if there were thousand, all with the same brand. Suddenly the rules that I put into place such as "no two dealers can post the same thing" or "all inventory items that we promote have to have something special about them" suddenly become a huge challenge to apply. That's when it hit me. It isn't that the OEM social media efforts that I've been bashing for the last year are being run by people who don't know what they're doing. It's that coming up with a scalable plan in a manual arena like social media is like trying to mass-produce something by hand.

It takes people. The more dealers they have, the more people they'll need. Unfortunately, finding the right people, keeping them all coordinated, informing them of the changes that are happening in social media every week or so, and keeping it all in line within a budget is a daunting task. I was speaking to my counterpart at one of the OEM social media providers and was informed that each of their reps handle 175 accounts. My jaw literally dropped wide open. A coworker stopped in front of my door while passing by because of the look of shock on my face. Seriously.

Currently, my team is reaching their limits and I have 15 dealers per social media team member. That's how labor-intensive manual, high-quality social media can be. Those of you who run your own social media at your dealership can do the math and see that it pans out. How an OEM or a vendor can expect one person to handle 175 accounts is absolutely mind-boggling. It is, unfortunately, the reality, and their processes are the reason that they are working with an OEM and I am not.

Is it difficult to make an OEM-level social media program that is scalable but that still achieves the end results of selling more cars and drivng more service business while representing the dealership appropriately in the community and keeping in constant communication with all customers that reach out? Yes.

Is it impossible? Perhaps, but I won't accept that.

Here's my challenge to you, Driving Sales Community. If you could picture what attributes would be necessary for an OEM-level social media program to work properly, I'd love to hear it. Here are the minimum criteria:

1. Be scalable, of course.
2. Promote the overall brand across the country.
3. Promote the dealership's brand locally.
4. Sell cars. No, not just by increasing exposure, not by putting an inventory widget on a tab, and not by posting cat pictures. It must really, truly sell cars directly through social media.

The last part is, of course, the tough one when applying the first criteria along with it. Scalable and effective. They are hard to put together. Other vendors have proven that social media is scalable but they're not selling cars. I've proven that social media can sell cars directly, but it's not scalable. I need the middle ground.

Thoughts?

I had one of the most exciting things ever happen to me professionally around this time last year. I recall it specifically because I remember Halloween being in the air when the news came around. My company wanted me to build a social media solution that took everything that I had learned outside of automotive and brought it into our industry.

This alone was not exciting. The key was that I had told them that the only way I would do it is if they understood that this required extreme levels of manual effort, that automation was completely out of the question, that it would be nothing like anything else in the industry, and that it would probably be very expensive. The agreed to the rules. That was the exciting part.

Fast forward to today and 99% of what I had predicted had come true. Everything's flowing nicely. Clients are happy. Nobody has cancelled in a year. Things are grand. There's a sad part to this story, the part that makes it important for dealers to understand.

When considering how to take this type of a product as-is to an OEM, I'm completely stumped. Manual effort works fine for hundreds of clients, but what would happen if there were thousand, all with the same brand. Suddenly the rules that I put into place such as "no two dealers can post the same thing" or "all inventory items that we promote have to have something special about them" suddenly become a huge challenge to apply. That's when it hit me. It isn't that the OEM social media efforts that I've been bashing for the last year are being run by people who don't know what they're doing. It's that coming up with a scalable plan in a manual arena like social media is like trying to mass-produce something by hand.

It takes people. The more dealers they have, the more people they'll need. Unfortunately, finding the right people, keeping them all coordinated, informing them of the changes that are happening in social media every week or so, and keeping it all in line within a budget is a daunting task. I was speaking to my counterpart at one of the OEM social media providers and was informed that each of their reps handle 175 accounts. My jaw literally dropped wide open. A coworker stopped in front of my door while passing by because of the look of shock on my face. Seriously.

Currently, my team is reaching their limits and I have 15 dealers per social media team member. That's how labor-intensive manual, high-quality social media can be. Those of you who run your own social media at your dealership can do the math and see that it pans out. How an OEM or a vendor can expect one person to handle 175 accounts is absolutely mind-boggling. It is, unfortunately, the reality, and their processes are the reason that they are working with an OEM and I am not.

Is it difficult to make an OEM-level social media program that is scalable but that still achieves the end results of selling more cars and drivng more service business while representing the dealership appropriately in the community and keeping in constant communication with all customers that reach out? Yes.

Is it impossible? Perhaps, but I won't accept that.

Here's my challenge to you, Driving Sales Community. If you could picture what attributes would be necessary for an OEM-level social media program to work properly, I'd love to hear it. Here are the minimum criteria:

1. Be scalable, of course.
2. Promote the overall brand across the country.
3. Promote the dealership's brand locally.
4. Sell cars. No, not just by increasing exposure, not by putting an inventory widget on a tab, and not by posting cat pictures. It must really, truly sell cars directly through social media.

The last part is, of course, the tough one when applying the first criteria along with it. Scalable and effective. They are hard to put together. Other vendors have proven that social media is scalable but they're not selling cars. I've proven that social media can sell cars directly, but it's not scalable. I need the middle ground.

Thoughts?

It's not for everyone. Some people just don't like to hear their voices played on audio or video. I know. I used to be one of them.

If you can get over that fear and if you want to get your YouTube channel some watches while helping to get your content seen and heard, it's a quick and easy way to kill a couple of birds with a single stone. The concept is pretty simple. Write a blog post, then read it off while recording a video. Attach the video to the story and now you have an easy way for people to either read your blog post or watch it.

Perhaps more importantly, it takes the art of writing and allows you to get creative in the fastest growing medium. Remember, everything is going mobile. While it can be annoying trying to read a blog post on a smartphone, listening to it on YouTube is often much easier. If you get good at recording the audio from the posts and applying it to either a visual of yourself reading it, a slideshow, a scrolling transcript, or other images that are pertinent to the video itself, you can make for an alternative experience for your content.

Some people are readers. Others are listening. There's even a few people that like to do both. I tend to listen to a video or podcast playing in the background while reading something else. Here's an example:

It's not for everyone. Some people just don't like to hear their voices played on audio or video. I know. I used to be one of them.

If you can get over that fear and if you want to get your YouTube channel some watches while helping to get your content seen and heard, it's a quick and easy way to kill a couple of birds with a single stone. The concept is pretty simple. Write a blog post, then read it off while recording a video. Attach the video to the story and now you have an easy way for people to either read your blog post or watch it.

Perhaps more importantly, it takes the art of writing and allows you to get creative in the fastest growing medium. Remember, everything is going mobile. While it can be annoying trying to read a blog post on a smartphone, listening to it on YouTube is often much easier. If you get good at recording the audio from the posts and applying it to either a visual of yourself reading it, a slideshow, a scrolling transcript, or other images that are pertinent to the video itself, you can make for an alternative experience for your content.

Some people are readers. Others are listening. There's even a few people that like to do both. I tend to listen to a video or podcast playing in the background while reading something else. Here's an example:

There was a huge uproar in the search marketing and website design industry last year when Google came out and recommended responsive web design. While Google has been known to make recommendations in the past, they've never tackled this particular issue definitively until June, 2012. Since then, many companies have been scrambling to convert to a responsive design.

They reiterated the need for a mobile solution earlier this year when they said that they would soon stop showing web pages that improperly redirected to a different page when called up on mobile devices. The two pieces of news were combined because of a logical series of assumptions:

1. Google wants pages to render on any device
2. Responsive website design accomplishes the goal
3. Google likes responsive website design
4. Therefore, Google does not like adaptive website design

Everything is fine until you come to the conclusion. From a search perspective, properly coded adaptive websites with identical intents on all devices combined with proper transfer of HTML content are just as easy to rank well on Google as responsive website design.

As I researched this, I found one things that was disturbing and that needs to be addressed. The opinions most commonly expressed by companies weighing in on the debate between between responsive website design versus adaptive website design always ran parallel with the offerings of the company posting the opinion. If they offered responsive design, they said that responsive design was the only way to go. If they offered adaptive websites, they said that adaptive was the best way to go.

The unbiased publications that I read almost all came to the same conclusion - functionality of the site was much more important than the type of design used. In other words, if responsive design made it challenging for a website to function properly on mobile devices, then adaptive websites were recommended. If the flow was fine between devices and the path to turning to responsive design was an easy one, then that was the way to go.

I'm going to start with the "bias" on my end and finish this paragraph with the punchline. The bias is this: my company is developing responsive website design for our clients. The punchline is this: even with this knowledge, I still recommend adaptive for any website (including my clients' websites) that are picture- and call-to-action-heavy on important pages such as inventory.

I have yet to see a responsive car dealer website that did not sacrifice functionality and speed for the sake of responsive design. I've seen both sides of the spectrum - websites that looked great and worked fine on mobile devices but that were bare-bones in their PC functionality and I've seen websites that looked great on a PC but that were too slow and rendered improperly on many mobile devices. I haven't seen any that have done it "right" yet because of the nature of car dealer websites.

Most importantly, I've seen dealer websites that switched from adaptive to responsive that watched their website leads drop as a result. I have yet to see a single one that saw leads increase. This will change as responsive technology, internet speeds, third party plugins, and image crunching (especially for dealers that load up 30+ images on their vehicle detail pages) improves, but as of now responsive has been a huge flop.

I should also note that I jumped on the responsive bandwagon back in 2011 and strongly pushed for my company to adopt it way back then. Thankfully, we didn't.

I should also note that for the majority of websites, responsive is likely the best solution. Car dealers have unique website formats. On any given page, especially the all-important vehicle details pages, there may be three or four plugins, a dozen calls-to-action, and dozens of photos that have to be brought in through 3G or 4G connections. The biggest difference between adaptive website design and responsive website design is when the changes are made to adjust for the device. On adaptive websites, the changes are server side, meaning that the data being sent is determined from the server before being sent to the device. With responsive design, the changes are client side, meaning that the whole web page is sent through and then the device is told how to piece it all together.

Here's a very slanted infographic, one that actually does have some valid points (thankfully). Whoever built it likes adaptive and while they are being too harsh in my opinion about responsive, they still bring up some real challenges.

There was a huge uproar in the search marketing and website design industry last year when Google came out and recommended responsive web design. While Google has been known to make recommendations in the past, they've never tackled this particular issue definitively until June, 2012. Since then, many companies have been scrambling to convert to a responsive design.

They reiterated the need for a mobile solution earlier this year when they said that they would soon stop showing web pages that improperly redirected to a different page when called up on mobile devices. The two pieces of news were combined because of a logical series of assumptions:

1. Google wants pages to render on any device
2. Responsive website design accomplishes the goal
3. Google likes responsive website design
4. Therefore, Google does not like adaptive website design

Everything is fine until you come to the conclusion. From a search perspective, properly coded adaptive websites with identical intents on all devices combined with proper transfer of HTML content are just as easy to rank well on Google as responsive website design.

As I researched this, I found one things that was disturbing and that needs to be addressed. The opinions most commonly expressed by companies weighing in on the debate between between responsive website design versus adaptive website design always ran parallel with the offerings of the company posting the opinion. If they offered responsive design, they said that responsive design was the only way to go. If they offered adaptive websites, they said that adaptive was the best way to go.

The unbiased publications that I read almost all came to the same conclusion - functionality of the site was much more important than the type of design used. In other words, if responsive design made it challenging for a website to function properly on mobile devices, then adaptive websites were recommended. If the flow was fine between devices and the path to turning to responsive design was an easy one, then that was the way to go.

I'm going to start with the "bias" on my end and finish this paragraph with the punchline. The bias is this: my company is developing responsive website design for our clients. The punchline is this: even with this knowledge, I still recommend adaptive for any website (including my clients' websites) that are picture- and call-to-action-heavy on important pages such as inventory.

I have yet to see a responsive car dealer website that did not sacrifice functionality and speed for the sake of responsive design. I've seen both sides of the spectrum - websites that looked great and worked fine on mobile devices but that were bare-bones in their PC functionality and I've seen websites that looked great on a PC but that were too slow and rendered improperly on many mobile devices. I haven't seen any that have done it "right" yet because of the nature of car dealer websites.

Most importantly, I've seen dealer websites that switched from adaptive to responsive that watched their website leads drop as a result. I have yet to see a single one that saw leads increase. This will change as responsive technology, internet speeds, third party plugins, and image crunching (especially for dealers that load up 30+ images on their vehicle detail pages) improves, but as of now responsive has been a huge flop.

I should also note that I jumped on the responsive bandwagon back in 2011 and strongly pushed for my company to adopt it way back then. Thankfully, we didn't.

I should also note that for the majority of websites, responsive is likely the best solution. Car dealers have unique website formats. On any given page, especially the all-important vehicle details pages, there may be three or four plugins, a dozen calls-to-action, and dozens of photos that have to be brought in through 3G or 4G connections. The biggest difference between adaptive website design and responsive website design is when the changes are made to adjust for the device. On adaptive websites, the changes are server side, meaning that the data being sent is determined from the server before being sent to the device. With responsive design, the changes are client side, meaning that the whole web page is sent through and then the device is told how to piece it all together.

Here's a very slanted infographic, one that actually does have some valid points (thankfully). Whoever built it likes adaptive and while they are being too harsh in my opinion about responsive, they still bring up some real challenges.

As Facebook continues its unofficial quest to make the platform pay to play and with Twitter quickly following in those footsteps, many are looking towards advertising as the most important component, but they would be wrong. Others who sell their products would say that strategy can overcome the need to play, but they would be incorrect as well. It’s the third component that plays in both of the other two realms that really makes up about half of the equation.

Social media marketing for the automotive industry is 2 parts content, 1 part strategy, and 1 part spend. There was a time not too long ago that it was even more prominent, but modern social media requires businesses to apply all three in order to have a winning combination.

Content is the beginning. You have to have a nice array of content to post on your social profiles, particularly on Facebook. Twitter has a never-ending flow of content bombarding you every day in the form of the blogs you read, the news that presents itself, random thoughts that make for good Tweets, and random pictures that you take or that you find on the internet. Pinterest is quickly becoming more about search than anything else and Google+ is failing in its mission to be anything more than a search engine tool. This leaves Facebook as the lone component that requires full effort in order to find the appropriate content.

Strategy must be applied once the content is gathered. Some have the time and resources to accumulate a strong pool of content and can plan out much of what they’ll post on Facebook ahead of time. Others must take what they can find in the limited time they have to find it every day or every week. Either way, a proper strategy that plays to both the algorithm as well as the expectations of the fans must be integrated in order to deliver the right content at the right time.

Advertising is the third component. It’s the trap. It’s the aspect of Facebook that seems so easy in the beginning but that can be butchered very quickly to the point that you can no longer effectively advertise. Here’s what happens…

You start off and see the “Boost Post” button on something that you just put up on the page. You click it and see that for $15, you can expose your content to thousands of people. Heck, you can probably reach a couple thousand people by spending $5 if your page is doing pretty well already. You give it a shot and, voila! Your post gets more exposure, more reach, and more engagement than anything you’ve posted in the past. You do the math and you start boosting other posts. It’s all good stuff.

One day, you see that your boosting numbers look different. Rather than spending $5 and reaching 1200-1700 people like you did a couple days before, you see that the same money now only buys you 500-950 views. You might do it or you might even bump it up to $10 for this post. Either way, you hope that it’s just a temporary drop because you’ve been telling everyone how awesome you are at Facebook.

A couple of weeks later, your heart sinks when you see something like the example below. This is a Facebook page that has 1700 fans that we took over recently. They didn’t do anything wrong, really. They simply didn’t go through the steps and monitor their EdgeRank properly to prevent this type of dip from happening. In short, Facebook and this page’s fans have spoken. They were exposed to the wrong content at the wrong times and it ate away at their potential to use Facebook ads.

Thankfully, it can be fixed. It requires content. Great content. Facebook advertising is different from other types of advertising in that the sentiment towards the ads has a tremendous effect on the potential reach and ROI on future ads. If you advertise something that gets a lot of negative feedback, it will cost more to advertise your next few posts. The ads are tied in directly with the organic algorithm. With Google, you can optimize your way to the top of you can buy your way to the top. On Facebook, there’s no distinction between advertised posts and organic posts. Just because you pay doesn’t mean that your posts will be seen.

With the right strategy, properly managed advertising, and a ton of great content, you can master the art and science of social advertising. With any single portion missing, there’s a good chance that you can do more harm than good.

As Facebook continues its unofficial quest to make the platform pay to play and with Twitter quickly following in those footsteps, many are looking towards advertising as the most important component, but they would be wrong. Others who sell their products would say that strategy can overcome the need to play, but they would be incorrect as well. It’s the third component that plays in both of the other two realms that really makes up about half of the equation.

Social media marketing for the automotive industry is 2 parts content, 1 part strategy, and 1 part spend. There was a time not too long ago that it was even more prominent, but modern social media requires businesses to apply all three in order to have a winning combination.

Content is the beginning. You have to have a nice array of content to post on your social profiles, particularly on Facebook. Twitter has a never-ending flow of content bombarding you every day in the form of the blogs you read, the news that presents itself, random thoughts that make for good Tweets, and random pictures that you take or that you find on the internet. Pinterest is quickly becoming more about search than anything else and Google+ is failing in its mission to be anything more than a search engine tool. This leaves Facebook as the lone component that requires full effort in order to find the appropriate content.

Strategy must be applied once the content is gathered. Some have the time and resources to accumulate a strong pool of content and can plan out much of what they’ll post on Facebook ahead of time. Others must take what they can find in the limited time they have to find it every day or every week. Either way, a proper strategy that plays to both the algorithm as well as the expectations of the fans must be integrated in order to deliver the right content at the right time.

Advertising is the third component. It’s the trap. It’s the aspect of Facebook that seems so easy in the beginning but that can be butchered very quickly to the point that you can no longer effectively advertise. Here’s what happens…

You start off and see the “Boost Post” button on something that you just put up on the page. You click it and see that for $15, you can expose your content to thousands of people. Heck, you can probably reach a couple thousand people by spending $5 if your page is doing pretty well already. You give it a shot and, voila! Your post gets more exposure, more reach, and more engagement than anything you’ve posted in the past. You do the math and you start boosting other posts. It’s all good stuff.

One day, you see that your boosting numbers look different. Rather than spending $5 and reaching 1200-1700 people like you did a couple days before, you see that the same money now only buys you 500-950 views. You might do it or you might even bump it up to $10 for this post. Either way, you hope that it’s just a temporary drop because you’ve been telling everyone how awesome you are at Facebook.

A couple of weeks later, your heart sinks when you see something like the example below. This is a Facebook page that has 1700 fans that we took over recently. They didn’t do anything wrong, really. They simply didn’t go through the steps and monitor their EdgeRank properly to prevent this type of dip from happening. In short, Facebook and this page’s fans have spoken. They were exposed to the wrong content at the wrong times and it ate away at their potential to use Facebook ads.

Thankfully, it can be fixed. It requires content. Great content. Facebook advertising is different from other types of advertising in that the sentiment towards the ads has a tremendous effect on the potential reach and ROI on future ads. If you advertise something that gets a lot of negative feedback, it will cost more to advertise your next few posts. The ads are tied in directly with the organic algorithm. With Google, you can optimize your way to the top of you can buy your way to the top. On Facebook, there’s no distinction between advertised posts and organic posts. Just because you pay doesn’t mean that your posts will be seen.

With the right strategy, properly managed advertising, and a ton of great content, you can master the art and science of social advertising. With any single portion missing, there’s a good chance that you can do more harm than good.

There's an exciting thing that can happen when you first start advertising on social media. The organic measures of exposure are quickly fading away, so when you get that first boost of exposure as a result of spending very little money, it can become addicting.

It's a trap. Overexposing at the wrong time to the wrong people can prevent you from being able to reach the right people in the future, particularly on Facebook. As I've mentioned many times, social advertising is very different from other forms of online advertising as the performance of the content being promoted has a dramatic and often instant impact on subsequent posts.

In other words, done wrong, you can do real damage.

The story of the tortoise and the hare is one that few want to hear. They don't want their advertising to resemble that of a slow tortoise in any way, shape, or form. However, the reality is that it's the best way to reach the most people in the long term as well as in the short term. Look at these statistics:

As with nearly every attempt at social media, there's a quick spike. Just about everyone who is not using advertising in their social media is having a hard time truly reaching anyone, particularly at the local level. Even with a strategy grounded in consistency, there is still the initial spike and it's almost always a noticeable difference.

The problem is that with many of the pages I check out that are using social media advertising, the view is much different. It's high peaks and low valleys. The overall reach early on is great. The problem is that the spikes are damaging. There's no consistent growth of active fans. There's no steady engagement being built up. It's happening all at once.

There are plenty of reasons why slow and steady after the initial burst is preferable to spikes and low points, but the biggest reason is that the overall number of people reached is much, much higher when it's done with a sound steady strategy. It's not easy to see because Facebook doesn't offer the proper tracking and because it's somewhat counter-intuitive, but once you really dive in and see what's happening it makes sense.

You see, the 10,000 people reached one week are not the same 10,000 people reached the following week. Sure, there are plenty of people (if you're doing it right) who see most of the things you post, but a consistent strategy aimed at spreading out the reach is much more effective at reaching the masses. Facebook insights don't portray this properly which is why you see so many who throw money at Facebook to see the big spikes. It feels like you're reaching more people that way, but you're not.

The only time there should be spikes is when there's something extremely important to get exposed. These should be rare. Sure, there's always something really important going on - the big sale, a new model rolling out, incentives, etc. - but it has to be social gold as well a being important. Otherwise, standard promotion will do the trick.

Unfortunately, it's very easy based on the fallacies in Facebook Insights for a company to demonstrate their effectiveness using inflated numbers. The biggest problem is that it cannot be sustained that way. Social media advertising is the easiest thing to do. It's also the easiest thing to do wrong.