We are close to having enough questions in to do a two-part "Ask Me Anything" now. Keep the questions coming!

Surely there's something that you've always wanted to know about automotive internet marketing. There are plenty of experts out there - I'm nobody special. I will do two things:

1. Give an honest, unbiased answer that has nothing to do with my company. I represent KPA professionally, but for this AMA I'll be answering the questions from the perspective of representing Driving Sales and the automotive industry in general.
2. Apply knowledge accumulated from nearly two decades in the automotive industry - 11 years at dealerships and 6 years on the vendor side. When I was 19, I was selling ads for a newspaper. I was in school and about to be a dad. One of my clients was a car dealership who told me about the real money I could make if I went to work for them. The rest is history.

It doesn't matter what you want to ask. Send your questions to eric@drivingsales.com and I'll answer some of the questions this week and the rest of them next week. If enough come in, we'll even do a trilogy.

I’m always hesitant to talk to people about the wonders of Facebook advertising. It’s the most cost-effective way to get the word out to the right people. The targeting capabilities make Google envious and the effectiveness, when done right, is nothing short of a work of art for driving business.

The hesitation comes with the major caveat that surrounds Facebook advertising. It can be both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing because, unlike Adwords or other forms of digital advertising, you can actually do harm to your page and your future posts.

Facebook is governed by one of the most fickle algorithms ever created. It works in real time and has a long memory, making it like walking on eggshells when trying to promote a business. There are strategies for content posting that are specifically designed to play up to the algorithm just as there are strategies for playing properly with search algorithms. The difference is that there’s no attachment between paid and organic in search while paid and organic promoted posts on Facebook are connected at the hip.

Here is an example of the “Boost” options on a Facebook page that we manage for a client. It has around 1500 fans and thankfully we were able to build it nearly from scratch – they had 26 fans when we took the page over 4 months ago.

The numbers represented here show the estimated reach for the different numerical values available to be spent. These are stereotypical numbers of a well-managed page of this size with a history of posting strong content. It’s lower than what a fresh page can expect; Facebook gives first-time advertisers a wide range of people who can like their posts before reducing it down based upon successes and failures. The reduction is inevitable because as people see posts in their news feeds and do not interact with them, they become less likely to see the next post you put up. Unless you’re posting Shakespeare-quality unique content that is driving your audience to become mad fans, you will certainly see a major dip in reach potential.

The numbers go up and down, but as long as you can keep them reaching the total number of fans you have on the page with the lowest denomination of spend, you’re in a good place in the eyes of the Facebook algorithm.

Now, here’s an example of a different page. Same industry. More fans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly the reach potential.

Sometime in the past, they burned enough people who saw their posts that they’re having challenges reaching them a second time. It could have just been poor content, but a scan of the page doesn’t lend to this theory.

The only other explanation is that they’ve used Facebook ads in the past and butchered them. They posted content that was deemed spammy and then promoted it to a ton of people.

It would be like picking up a bullhorn and screaming fowl language at people as they walked by the store.

The damage is done. It’s reversible, but we have a pretty long road ahead with this much damage to correct. If the offending post or posts was so bad that a lot of people reported or made their posts hidden, it might turn out to be a better idea to start over from scratch.

Facebook is an extremely powerful advertising tool, but there are right ways and wrong ways to harness that power. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use it for business-relevant posts. It just means that you cannot use it to spam the wrong messages. Before posting or promoting anything, ask yourself if you would want to see something like it on your news feed if it was from a different industry. In other words, if you run a car dealership, before posting this week’s newspaper ad and promoting it to 50,000 people, ask yourself if you would enjoy seeing a newspaper ad selling furniture popping up in your news feed between posts of little Timmy sliding into third base and your hilarious co-worker’s hilarious rant of the day.

Bill the Butcher was one of the greatest characters in movie history, but Bob the Butcher (you know, your Facebook ad guy) isn’t going to win you an Oscar for best Facebook post if he’s promoting content that doesn’t belong on Facebook.

We all get our oil change. It’s a relatively constant thing. Most people are comfortable with getting their oil changed regularly. Some cars tell you when it’s time. Most people have a sticker on their windshield that tells them when it’s time. Heck, our internal clock often reminds us.

Now, imagine that you don’t know when it’s time to change. Instead of the 3000-5000 miles, your car doesn’t have a set time. It just decides that it needs to be changed. Imagine that your car doesn’t tell you, that you have to check it every now and then.

What if the type of oil changed regularly. You might need 5W-30 this time. Next time, your car requires 15W-40. Then, you hear that your car actually wanted the 5W-30 this time and the 14W-40 needs to be drained immediate – that doesn’t start working until next month.

For those mechanically minded, imagine that the configuration of your engine itself moves between oil changes. This time, you have to do it like normal but next time you may have to put it on a lift and change it from the bottom, or your car spontaneously develops a way for you to change the oil from the cabin of the car, but it must be moving at over 30 miles per hour at the time for it to work right.

This is the world of social media. I’m not trying to scare anybody. It’s just a statement of the way things are. What worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. Today, text posts work best on Facebook. Two months ago, it was images. There are those who say that they’re seeing an increase in the engagement on images again and a decline in text post engagement.

Pinterest was nowhere to be seen a year ago in automotive social media. Today, it’s a big thing. Tomorrow, it could be dead again, replaced by Scoop.it or Overblog or any of the up-and-comers in social media. It could be replaced by something we haven’t even seen yet.

Instagram was a neat app a year ago. Once Facebook bought them, they became more of a thing. Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and even Apple are constantly in the market for social products of some sort (though Apple hasn’t pulled the trigger just yet). When they buy them, what happens? Do they improve? Become more relevant? Get ruined?

Techniques, strategies, best practices – they all change constantly in social media. Again, I’m definitely not trying to use fear tactics to tell can’t do it on their own. You can. It doesn’t take a lot of time or energy to come up with the right strategies, to track the changes, and to play with the various dynamics involved in a strong automotive social media presence. I’m simply saying this: if you’re going to do social media for your dealership, be sure to stay on top of things. Make it a priority to read, study, and test.

I was asked by a peer why I hadn’t written an automotive social media book yet. I told him that by the time I made it to chapter 6, chapter 2 and 3 would be obsolete. Social is moving. It always has and it always will. Keep that in mind when pursuing your own strategy. If the scariest part about social media is change, the worst thing that you can do is get complacent.

Yesterday, I found myself utterly mortified. I caught a Pinterest page that my team was managing uploading images to Pinterest. After several deep breaths, I talked to my teammate and corrected this for the future.

Pinterest has an image upload feature. I wish they didn’t. There’s absolutely no reason to pin an image directly to Pinterest. I won’t even use the mobile app for this reason.

As a traffic-driving social force, Pinterest is close to the top. As a social signal for search engines, it’s an important component. When you upload an image directly to Pinterest, you lose both opportunities. It’s not like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or Tumblr where direct uploads have benefits over linked posts. There’s zero difference between uploading directly to Pinterest or pinning an image from another site other than the loss of the two benefits the social network offers.

If you have an image that you want to Pin, put it somewhere else first. Post it to your blog. Put it on Tumblr, Upload it to Google+. Do something, anything other than uploading it to Pinterest itself. It’s an extra few seconds of work but yields an actual benefit other than simple exposure of that great image of the Ferrari you saw at dinner last night. When you pin from a different source, you’re getting the full value from Pinterest.

It's a topic that I hope to cover in detail at Driving Sales Executive Summit this year in Vegas and one that is very close to my professional heart. The reason that I'm so passionate about it is that the conceptual copout of branding for social media is spreading more in our industry instead of being debunked the way it should be.

Branding is not a proper goal of social media. It's one of the things that happens if you're doing social media the right way, but to call it a goal is like saying that you take ups at the dealership for the exercise. Sure, you're getting more exercise walking around the lot than you do when sitting at your desk, but that's not why you do it. You take ups and walk around the lot with customers in hopes of selling them a car.

Social media has been reduced during the time when it should be expanded. There are techniques, campaigns, and strategies that have been proven to drive more foot traffic to the dealership and more visitors to websites. Done right, social media can increase leads and drive more sales. It can bring people to the service bay who otherwise would never have visited the dealership if it weren't for social media. The examples keep mounting, but unfortunately it's only for an extremely small percentage of dealers who have cut ties with malformed strategies and processes.

I was once part of the problem. It wasn't much more than two years ago when I was preaching the power of branding through social media. Thankfully, I came to my sense as I watched social media evolve, witnessed an expansion of the medium's capabilities, and learned from some bold dealers ways that helped them to truly succeed on social media.

That's it for my late night rant. I hope to talk more about this extremely important topic October 13th-15th at the Bellagio.

This is the first (and most likely last) time that I will use a Hillary Clinton book title as the concept for a blog post. I didn’t read the book, but the concept is definitely applicable in social media.

I was speaking to a potential client yesterday who was telling me some of their challenges with social media. The main challenge they were having was in coming up with interesting content to post that was associated with business. As a car dealer, they had plenty of pictures of cars to post, but they weren’t very active in the local community and the person in charge of social media didn’t consider herself to be creative.

“Does anyone at the dealership do anything interesting?” It was a simple question that sparked a 2 minute conversation that turned into an hour-long brainstorming session. At the end, we came to the conclusion that she worked at the most interesting dealership in the world and didn’t know it.

The parts manage was in a country band that played at the local steak house saloon on Saturday nights. They had a customer that came in 5-days a week to get what he considered to be the best coffee in town with their fancy cappuccino machine in the service waiting area. A sales person was a little league baseball coach that recruited the top talent in town to take to tournaments across the country.

Last night, she did some further research and found even more interesting things. The land on which the dealership was built turned out to have a rich and somewhat controversial history. One of the secretaries had a son who was likely going to he starting for the state university basketball team the following year. Another sales person had a photography business on the side where people posed in or around classic cars.

Everyone gets into a rut. We try our best to be creative and to come up with interesting things to post to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+, but sometimes it seems that you’re posting the same things over and over again. Finding images is easy. Unfortunately, social media needs to be richer, more robust. It’s not just about pieces of content. It’s about stories that affect the local area and the people that make up your business, customer base, and community.

You don’t have to live on social media island. There are people around you who can inspire you, spark an idea, or become the subject of content that can all be tied back to the business itself. The difference between being isolated on social media and having a flood of potential content is often about getting up from your desk and talking to people. In essence, the key to successful social media is often as simple as being social in the real world and applying it to your business presence.

Stop the madness! I, unfortunately, might be part of the cause of the recent trends happening on dealer Twitter profiles and for that, I am truly sorry.

For years, I've been harping on the concept that Twitter is something that no dealer should avoid because of how quick and easy it is. There's no huge investment of time required to have a strong Twitter presence. This advice and the advice of others has been turned into something that it should not have been, namely a willingness to completely automate Twitter. Please stop.

Twitter doesn't take much time, but it should take some time. Rather that go over the long list of things that you should and shouldn't do on Twitter in an extended format, here's the bullet points. Rather than try to convince anyone, I'm just going to state what I believe and let questions come in if there's need for further clarification. Just trust that I makes these statements with reasons in mind. They're not just spewing out of my mouth (or any other area) randomly.

• Don't feed from Facebook. It's all too common nowadays to take automatically post whatever you put on Facebook directly onto Twitter. This is a bad idea.
• Minimize the other feeds on Twitter. In an ideal world, there would be no feeds populating your Twitter account, especially your own blog, because it just doesn't save a ton of time and it limits the effectiveness. With feeds, you can't craft hashtags, you can't personalize the statements, and you aren't truly vetting the links.
• Post more than just links. Sadly, links get much lower engagement than purely text posts. Express an opinion. Give an interesting piece of information. Tell a little story. Ask questions. The posts with no links get much more attention than those that do have links.
• Don't use Hootsuite to post images. Hootsuite does not post images through Twitter directly and therefore they're not inline. They're just a link to the image itself hosted on Hootsuite. Your images should be through Twitter itself or through a tool that uploads the files to the native Twitter feed such as Bufferapp.
• Include @replies to people. It's very easy to see if a Twitter account sucks or is automated because they aren't talking to others.
• Retweet, but not too often. It's good to have other faces on your page, which means a direct retweet. This can be done through some tools such as Hootsuite or Bufferapp. Make sure it's a true retweet rather than one which is a mention.

Twitter is definitely the easiest of the social networks to manage and monitor. Done right, it should take less than 5 minutes a day. That doesn't mean that it's easy to skip days. That, my friends, is something you absolutely shouldn't do.

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Article originally appeared on AutomotiveSocialMedia.com.

When it comes to social media advice, the majority of the common catch phrases are there for a reason. Tips like “be engaging” and “communicate, don’t broadcast” are sound pieces of advice despite the annoying frequency that they’re used by gurus. There’s one common tip that is more than just annoying. In many ways, it’s actually wrong.

“Know your audience” is a mantra, a driving force behind many blog posts and help videos. For those building blogs or social networks for the sake of having a nice hobby or making money through traffic-based advertising, it’s good advice. For businesses using a blog and social networks to increase sales of their products or services, it’s the type of advice that can send people in the wrong direction. Unless you’re making money directly from your blog, you shouldn’t attempt to know your audience.

Instead, you need to know your customers and potential customers. The current audience is irrelevant.

Catering content to fit in with the current audience will appease them. It will make them more likely to share your content. It will get more interactions and engagement. These are all good things. However, catering content to fit in with them does not help grow your business. Sure, some of the people in your audience might be current or future customers, but unless they’re the majority, the opinions of your audience don’t really matter.

This all stems from a conversation I had yesterday with a client. She has an automotive blog that has accumulated a nice following because of the content that she was posting. It was fun content that included memes of people parking like idiots, stunts, and beautiful pictures of hot rods. The audience loved it. The problem is that the audience wasn’t buying cars from her. They were spread across the world. There was nothing local and only an occasional post about the brand itself.

If you’re blogging for SEO reasons only, then this isn’t a bad idea. The problem is that having one domain linking to your single website isn’t going to give you much SEO juice. The effort is wasted. Your company blog should not be used for SEO reasons to drive links to your website because if you only have one website and one blog linking to it constantly, the effects are minimal.

Your blog should be geared towards building amazing content that your customers and potential customers can enjoy. It should be relevant to them and them alone. It’s nice to reach thousands of people with your general interest blog posts, but it doesn’t drive business. You should be focusing on getting content up that 100 local potential customers will find interesting rather than 10,000 people spread across the world. That general content might draw more overall traffic, but it’s not driving business-relevant traffic. More importantly, it’s not making an impact on the locals that actually are visiting your blog, at least not as much as if you were posting content that they could associate with because of the local nature of it.

Having a large audience is a blessing, but having a good localized audience can help your brand and increase business. That should be your focus.

I wish that this was going to be a story about baseball. I really do. Unfortunately, it's a story about education and the art of the sales pitch as it pertains to vendors on Driving Sales and other networks.

It is important to understand that every vendor in our industry has a responsibility. This is a tough business. Those of us who have been on the other side at the dealership level receiving pitches from vendors know that they come hard and they come often. It's part of the game. This is one of the most competitive industries out there from both perspectives - dealers competing against other dealers and vendors competiting to earn their business.

The internet in general and these networks, blogs, and webinars in particular are the tools we need to succeed at both levels. For dealers, it's an opportunity to learn ways to improve business, harness best practices, and bounce ideas against others in the industry. For vendors, it's a chance to hear what dealers think about certain topics, what they want out of products, and to what degree they want assistance versus direct help.

These venues are for mutual education. They're for dialogue. They're for ideas. They're not the place to pitch your products.

Some would say that education is worthless if it doesn't yield increased business at the vendor level. That's a different argument altogether, but I can tell you this much with a certainty...

If you help dealers by giving them tips, techniques, strategies, and advice that helps them with their business, they will be more inclined to look to you when they need your services.

It works. I see it every day. I don't have to pitch my social product to get calls and emails from dealers wanting to know how I can help. I simply post information as it comes to me that can help dealers succeed with or without my help. Some will do nothing with the information. Some will take it and apply it themselves. Some will take it and inquire about ways I can make it easier or do it for them.

As I said, it's the responsibility of every vendor in this industry to take the knowledge that they gain from their bird's eye view of things and translate it into ways that can help in the trenches at the dealership. The market is too questionable and the competition level is too high for anyone to hold their cards too close to the vest. It doesn't help the industry. It doesn't help dealers.

It doesn't help you.