A recent survey performed by Forrester and a scathing open letter from Nate Elliott to points to one major and undisputed fact: marketers and businesses are not getting the value they had hoped from Facebook advertising. That much is perfectly clear from the graphic. The reality, however, is that Facebook's only problem is that many marketers are stuck in the "spam and manipulate" model that simply doesn't work on Facebook.

Facebook isn't the one failing anyone, at least in this regard. It should be noted that I have never been the biggest fan of Facebook, what it represents, and in particular what it does with our data. With that said, I find myself reluctantly defending them because the assertions against them are absurd.

The biggest clue to the flawed nature of the premise is in the results themselves. If you were to take an experienced marketer and have them stack-rank the various marketing techniques based on how easily they can be manipulated, spammed, and generally utilized in nefarious ways, the top three would on the Forrester list would be the same that would be on the top of the "spamability" list. Gaming the system for reviews, search marketing, and email marketing are all extremely easy and are the favorites amongst those who are looking for the easy road.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not condemning the methods or those who game the various systems. Of the three, search is one that I operate in regularly and must combat the gaming of that particular system on a regular basis. The bottom line is that it is simple to get benefits from boosting online reviews, search marketing is getting more challenging but is still pretty easy to manipulate, and email marketing is, for the most part, about trying to provide value while staying within the rules. They are easy and effective.

Further down the list, we see the second clue. LinkedIn marketing is a very niche arena when it comes to effectiveness. The majority of businesses do not and should not be marketing their products through LinkedIn. Marketers themselves, however, find great value in marketing their services through LinkedIn. The fact that this is higher on the list than mobile marketing and YouTube marketing shows that the 395 marketers surveyed were considering their own personal gains from marketing as highly as they were considering their clients' gains.

The final clue comes in at number 4 on the list. Branded communities, like LinkedIn, are not appropriate for the majority of marketing agencies unless you're talking about how well they can be used to market the agency's services. To come in at #4 is ludicrous without the personal gains of the marketers taken into account. If branded communities worked so well, why wouldn't every flower shop, car dealership, and dental hygienist in North America have one? If Facebook marketing was so bad, why do just about every flower shop, car dealership, and dental hygienist waste their time one it?

Now, let's take a look at the post by Elliott. In short, he points to two problems that Facebook has with their advertising. He believes that Facebook does not drive genuine engagement and that they do not leverage their social data well enough. The statements are true for most. Facebook has not done enough to teach marketers how to take advantage of the system. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's Facebook's fault.

The reason that they aren't to blame is because tenacious, aggressive marketers are both driving genuine engagement and utilizing the social data that Facebook provides. Facebook's only fault in this regard is that they do not offer classes to those marketers who are too incompetent to use the instructions that Facebook offers, test the effectiveness of their efforts, and grow based upon using real marketing chops rather than have it waiting for Facebook to devise a road map that they can follow.

Unfortunately for the incompetent, such a road map can never exist. Facebook is a social network. It relies on creativity and manual effort, not automation and templates. For Elliot's statements to be truly accurate, Facebook would have to teach marketers how to market. It's a lost art nowadays because of the very advertising venues that are being heralded in the study. Marketers found an easy road to manipulate and spam. Why would they want to actually work for it?

Done properly, social media in general and Facebook in particular is the most cost-effective way to perform true marketing goals. It isn't a venue that your average internet marketing professional can do well in because it takes an old-school mentality to make it sing. Television advertising executives would probably have an easier time adjusting to the realities of Facebook than a search marketing pro any day. The former knows that creativity and effort supersede automation and manipulation. The latter, which likely accounts for the majority of those surveyed, doesn't understand the concept of "doing it by hand" or "quality over quantity". They are looking for a push-button solution. Facebook is not one of those.

Having tracked data for the last seven years in the automotive marketing arena, I can tell you a few things that I've learned that have brought us to where the content marketing world is today. It's all about process and answering the questions that consumers are asking and it's something that, as I've said time and time again in the past, needs to be viewed holistically.

Rather than go into a long post about how to make it all sing properly (that's for future posts), it's important to understand the content marketing trio. No, they have nothing to do with the Three Stooges, but those who don't understand the consumers' mentality might ended up looking like stooges in 2014. This is that important.

To get this understanding, you have to put yourself in the consumers' shoes. You buy things. Take what you know about that and apply it to the mentality and process below.

Where

If they can't find you, they can't do business with you. This is a no-brainer. You can advertise on the various networks, get your branding in place through billboards and radio, put ads in third-party sites across the internet, and a dozen other ways to help people find you, but it's search marketing that truly answers all of the questions that start with "where".

Since content marketing can help your search engine optimization tremendously, it fits in as the first of the trio. Most people are probably finding your website by the name of your company. While this is fine, you don't need to be heavily optimized to be found for your name. It's the other people, the ones that are doing generic searches for you by product or service in your local area, that can have a double impact on your business. By being better optimized, you are moving yourself up in searches which means you are also moving a competitor down.

What

This is your website. "What" you're trying to sell should be easy to determine once visitors get there. The challenge is that having a website that's just like every other website in your market is silly yet so commonly practiced thanks to the mega-vendors and forced OEM adoption.

There is a psychology that goes along with websites that says, "different is usually better". If your customers visit five websites, four of which look pretty much alike and the fifth, yours, looks different, they'll wonder why. It will register, even if only on a subconscious level. If the design and content are compelling, you have an advantage.

Why

In industries such as automotive where the differences in price are measured in small percentage points, the "why" factor comes into play. Most have a page that's a variation of "Why Buy from Us" on their website but it gets very few visitors. It takes more than that to get a consumer to consider you over a competitor.

This is one of the many places where social media comes into play. When are people most likely to click on the social media buttons on your website? When they're done. In other words, they might visit a handful of websites and put in leads at two or three of them. Once they're done, there's a decent chance that they'll click through to your social media presence to see what you're up to from the human side of the company. What will they see? Will it be a ton of ads? Will it be a ton of "look at me" posts?

What if they saw your community involvement? What if they saw your happy customers? What if they saw the local community engaging with you and you engaging back with them? They might look at you and two of your competitors during the course of their browsing. Will you be the most compelling? Does you social media presence give them a good reason to want to buy from you rather than the store down the block that's posting boring or unauthentic content on their social media profiles?

Holistic

In future posts, we'll go into how the holistic method of content marketing can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but it's important to understand that reasons that it's all tied together. Don't think search, websites, and social. Think where, what, and why.

There's a real beauty to Facebook for adults. It allows us to keep track of things that are happening in the lives of those important to us such as friends, coworkers, family, and those who are distant from us. It's for this reason that the hoopla about Facebook losing too many teens is being misunderstood by many, including Facebook itself.

Here's the thing. Facebook isn't cool. It hasn't been cool for a couple of years. It was cool before more adults started getting on it. Now it's a drag, at least from a teen perspective. They see their parents spending as much if not more time on it than they were and they simply don't want to be using the same social network as them. It's pretty natural. Few teens want to be hanging out in the same places that their grandparents hang.

More importantly, they don't have to. The people that they want to interact with are the people that they see for several hours five days per week. For the most part, their world is isolated to their friends from school. Facebook brings no additional value to fulfill their lives the way it does with adults. As some flock to Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks, it's natural to see this sort of exodus.

They'll be back.

When they graduate and they really want to know more about people than what they can see in 140-characters or less or what they can discover from a 15-second video, they'll turn to the same place they abandoned. When their friends go off to different colleges, take on different jobs, and move to different states or countries, they'll want to keep tabs on them in ways that only Facebook can deliver.

This isn't the end of Facebook. Kids might be the driving force that makes networks popular, but Facebook has reach a self-sustainability point. They are flocking away from it now, but they will flock right back to it in the future. They'll have to when they can no longer see their ex-boyfriend and who he's talking to in the lunch line. Businesses must understand this in order to make appropriate decisions about whether or not to invest in Facebook as an advertising venue. As Zach Billings mentioned in a blog post the other day, "If your target audience is an older crowd, then Facebook is still the social network of choice."

If your future target audience is the teens that will some day be adults, then you should still stick with Facebook.

There are those who think that Facebook and Twitter are the only relevant social networks when it comes to business. There are those who go so far as saying that Facebook is all that you need. In truth, both may be right, but that's strictly from a social perspective. Once you throw search into the equation, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr start having a bit more relevance than before.

Don't get me wrong. There's definitely social benefits that can be acquired through the "three lesser social networks". It's not all about search, but if for search and search alone you're able to find value, at least you're in there and participating.

These sites (and others, of course, but we're going to focus on these three) are able to improve social signals to your website. These social signals, a mysterious but undisputed component of the Google search ranking algorithm, can help your pages get indexed more quickly and demonstrate popularity in the social sites that would normally not be achievable. This is not a license or recommendation to go and spam these sites by any means. At the end of the day, the quality of the content must still be high.

Let's take a look at the quick and easy process. If you do it once a day, every day at a minimum, you will get benefit sooner rather than later.

Find the Right Content

You can't just start spamming pages that are important to you like contact forms. There needs to be a social component of some sort with the links. You have to find or build the right pages that can resonate. Sometimes, that means finding pages that we want to rank well in search that can also play well in social. At other times, it means using pages that don't really benefit us from a search perspective. Some would argue that there's no reason to share this type of content, but they don't understand social signals. While posting the direct page itself that you want ranked, there's a flow of "social signals juice" that flows from a page that does well in social signals to the other pages of your site.

In other words, promoting a strong piece of content that can get more social signals is better than promoting a page that won't do well in social media but that you would love to have ranked. Focus on the quality of the content and the social signal juice will flow across the board.

In this example, we're going to use a pre-owned Mercedes. It's pretty low hanging fruit - people love luxury vehicles on social media - so we'll be using the vehicle detail page itself. It's good social content and useful for business - perfect.

This will work nicely. Now, let's get it some social signals...

Get it on Google+

As with anything that you post on social media, you have to have a story behind it. Just saying something like, "Check out this Mercedes," that won't work. There needs to be something socially compelling about it to put it up anywhere.

In the example above, we see the story. It's a compelling plea to touch the desires of the audience. Once we've laid the groundwork in the text, we want to be transparent about what the link is going to do. There's no need to try to coax people into clicking on the link. Say what it is - "we want you to buy this car". Note the hashtags - important on every social site except for Facebook (for now).

Now, let's take a look at Pinterest and Tumblr.

Put it on Pinterest and Tumblr

There are a few different options here. Mix them up. Try a little of everything.

Option one is to post directly from the page itself onto Pinterest and Tumblr. Option two is to post the Google+ post to Pinterest and Tumblr. Option three is to mix it up - put the source on Pinterest and the Google+ post on Tumblr, for example. By mixing it up, you'll get variety on your Pinterest boards and Tumblog. Also, the signals, when followed, do have a certain level of flow from domain to domain. It's not as powerful as it is with inbound links, but it's there nonetheless.

Here it is on Pinterest taking it directly from the source. You'll note that the text associated with it is shorter, though still includes the hashtag.

On Tumblr, let's post from the Google+ post. Keep in mind that all three of these sites are relatively interchangeable. In other words, you could post from the source on Tumblr, then pin it and post it to Google+ from there. Of the social signals, Google+ is the most powerful so you won't want many of those to be from other sources.

Here's the Tumblr post:

In this case, we posted as a Tumblr link. It could have also been done as a Tumblr image with a link to the post in the content, but then it's not a social signal but rather an inbound link. No need to go into details about the difference here - as long as you're getting it posted, that's better than nothing. You'll also note that the content itself is duplicated from the Google+ post. I never, NEVER recommend using duplicated content anywhere, but because we're trying to make it easy enough for you to be willing to do it, I took the lesser of two evils. It's better that you do it rather than skipping it because it was too hard to do it the best way. The benefits are there even if it isn't perfect in this scenario.

* * *

Once you get used to the process, it takes about 5-10 minutes. Do it every day. Not everything should be a link to your site. In fact, you should mix in other content regularly. A good mix (despite the fact that I don't like giving formulas) would be to post 1-2 links to your site per week and fill the other 3-6 with outside content. Mix it up. Have some fun. Get the benefit. Take over your market.

If there's one thing that bugs me more than anything professionally, it's when bad marketing people give good marketing people a bad name by continuing to use spam and automated techniques when they simply do not work anymore. It's a plague in many industries, but seems to find its happiest home in the realm of search marketing.

There's a reason for this, of course. Real search marketing is hard. Google and Bing have done a masterful job the last three years at deterring just about every known form of search spamming out there. They have learned to recognize quality over bulk. They can tell when something is automated and when it's manually created. They can determine when links are legitimate or just placed there for the sake of optimization value. They're starting to discern between quality social signals and junk signals.

It's abundantly clear that those who rely on bulk and automation are losing ground. Why, then, are so many of them still heading in this direction? Why are they not only failing to stop the bad practices but are actually developing them even further? Call it a rant. Call it a warning. The smoke and mirrors in search marketing may have been exposed by Google and Bing, but they're still preying on businesses who aren't paying close enough attention to what's happening. Here are some examples:

Link networks have been broken since April 24th, 2012

This is one of the easiest ones to see because it held little ambiguity in the eyes of the search engines thanks to the two major and dozens of minor Penguin updates. They can tell when a network is specifically designed to drive links to various websites. They have devalued these links to the other side of zero. In other words, they aren't just worthless, they can actually do harm to the rankings of the recipients.

It has been a challenge for Google and Bing to distinguish between poor SEO tactics and blatant negative SEO attacks, but they're getting there. They know that if they give spammy or automated inbound links the ability to hurt the target domain that there will be those who drive links to their competitors in an effort to discredit them in the eyes of the search engines. As a result, Google created the disavow tool that may or may not have a powerful effect, but that's not the point. The reality is that if enough links are disavowed from a domain, Google can do a manual review to determine if this is the target or their SEO company's attempt to game the system or if it's a negative SEO attack. It's not perfect. It can be wrong. Thankfully, it's been working well so far.

Links should be earned, not created for the sake of SEO value. That's not to say that quality links cannot be built, but it's better to simply create value with the content and perform the appropriate tasks necessary to earn inbound links. It's not a matter of "if you build it, they will come,"  as it does take effort to get the target pages attention, but if the quality is truly useful and can be exposed to the right audience, the links will definitely come.

Automated content has been dying since 2011

Panda supposedly fixed this problem, yet it persists today. Heck, it's used as a shining example of the way to do SEO by some large companies. The challenge is that the Panda update is a work in progress. Google must learn how content flows and how to recognize based more about value than length of HTML code.

A couple of sentences followed by a useful infographic or video is better than 500 words of SEO spam, at least to the end user. Google is still learning how to recognize this properly, but one thing they have down is recognizing automated pages.

When pages are built automatically based upon pre-fab content with certain "unique content" factors in place, it has worked well in the past. Today, Google is de-indexing pages by the tens of thousands when they detect this type of automated SEO spam. If a page is created with low-quality content that cannot bring value to anyone, one should actually hope that nobody ever sees it. This can do even more damage when pages like these are indexed, start ranking, and start bringing in traffic.

People aren't stupid. Google isn't stupid. Still, some companies reminisce about the days when these things weren't factors. They are now, and some are unwilling to change their ways.

Quality is becoming a bigger component of social signals

You can buy just about anything when it comes to social media. Do you want more Facebook likes? There's a place to get those. You want more retweets from pages on your website? There's a huge market for them. Google +1s are often bought. This works...

...for now...

...but not for long.

Google and Bing already take into account the quality of a signal. This understanding is completely missed by many, including some of the most respected in the search marketing world. They will say that Google +1s is the most important factor in offsite search rankings, for example, but they won't mention that a +1 from a quality, aged, and trusted account is exponentially more powerful than a +1 from a spam account. This is a shame and I don't know whether it's simply not common knowledge or if it's just too difficult to make prospects understand.

As a result, marketing companies are buying social signals. They think that if they can get 100 retweets to a piece of content that their work is complete. What they don't seem to know is that those 100 retweets are being summarily dismissed by Google and possibly Bing. The same holds true for Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and some of the other social signal components. Today, quantity still works as long as there is some quality involved, but looking ahead, a savvy search marketer will be prepared for the days when these fake social signals will be as dangerous as the fake automated inbound links.

Quality

If there's one word that should be understood and adopted by every search marketing firm out there, it's quality. One strong piece of quality content is more powerful than 1000 automated pages. One high-quality inbound link is more powerful (and much less dangerous) than 10,000 low-quality links. A few social signals from trusted accounts is more powerful than hundred of signals from crap accounts and this is shifting more in that direction every day.

If you focus on quality, you'll win.

"Quality" image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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?

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.

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.