Upon first glance, you might believe that there is a mistake in the title. There isn't. There should not be an apostrophe before the "s" in the word "competitors" because I'm not asking if people are seeing your Google+ posts or your competitor's Google+ posts. I'm asking if they're seeing your Google+ posts or actual listings for your competitors themselves when people search for your dealership by name.

Here's a tail of two dealers. It's not about the dealerships themselves. It's about categories. There are dealers who are taking Google+ seriously and there are those who are not. I could go into great detail about the many reasons that you should take it seriously, but here's a quick little bit of information that you may find interesting.

Look at the image above. In the bottom right corner right above the fold in the search results, you'll see that they have their most recent Google+ post, a gorgeous Mustang. The post itself is irrelevant, actually. It's just the fact that it's taking up that spot.

Now, take a look at the image below, in particular the same bottom right area where the Google+ post should be if they were taking their verified Google+ presence seriously:

In a search for this dealership by name, Google is giving people options above the fold to explore other dealerships. It's present on a search for Amaral Auto Sales as well, but the sheer presence of an active Google+ page is enough to push their competitors below the fold on the search results.

It's not earth-shattering information, nor is it likely to affect business very much. It might never cause the dealership in the 2nd example to lose  sale. Then again, it might. Would you risk losing a sale for not taking part in a network that is free, that requires very little time to maintain, that helps you brand your dealership better and improve your website's search engine rankings?

I shouldn't even have to ask the question.

"Second place is a set of steak knives."

When Alec Baldwin's character lectured the sales team in Glengarry Glen Ross, he made it clear that the winner was the one on top, that everyone else was lucky to have a job, and that if they continued to perform the way they did they wouldn't have a job for much longer. The same holds true in social media. If you're not winning, you're losing, and all too often the strategies used in social media marketing are designed to lose.

I'm referring to branding. It's become too apparent over the last couple of years that many businesses and the social media companies that support them have turned branding into the ultimate goal of social media efforts. They believe that sales cannot be attained, that leads cannot be generated, and that trying to define the benefits is best left with something intangible like increased exposure of the brand. While this isn't completely wrong, it's selling the industry short. Social media can do so much more than branding.

In the automotive industry, for example, the goals of social media marketing should be first to drive foot traffic to the dealership. The 2nd place prize of every effort would be to drive website visitors. When all else fails, branding is the tertiary goal, the consolation prize. When that perspective is taken and an understanding is had that so much more can and should be done, the branding actually has the opportunity to flourish even more as a result.

Focus on business. Do the right things. Hire the right agencies, the ones that can demonstrate tangible ROI from their efforts rather than falling for the pitch that exposure is the best thing you can hope for. When branding becomes the top level goal, it's possible for one to be convinced that they should be posting funny cat pictures in order to get the exposure they need on social media. That couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, the goal is to get tangible benefit. Cat pictures won't do that.

Here's a video I did that highlights this myth and demonstrates why it's possible to have a proper hierarchy of goals to achieve the fullest level of success.

Facebook has a promise that it has made to businesses. It’s not an official promise in writing anywhere on the site. It’s an implied promise. “We have the attention of the masses. If you want to get in front of them, we’re the biggest game in town.”

The unfortunate reality is that the majority of businesses, particular small and medium localized ones, are completely missing out on the potential benefits of their Facebook page. It’s not all about the page, but that’s a good place to start and the best venue through which to have control over your own destiny.

Here are some signs that your social media strategy has your page operating at a low level. Don’t be discouraged – the vast majority of pages out there are feeling the same types of pains you are. The good news is that with a little help, businesses can make a swift turnaround and find success. It just takes understanding the realities of Facebook marketing.

1. Your Engagement Ratio and/or Total Engagers Are Low

As we’ve said in the past, the total number of fans is such an unimportant number that it’s not even funny. It’s all about reach, but that’s another story altogether. You can tell a lot about the effectiveness of any page by looking at two numbers up at the top.

The number of people “talking about this” compared to the number of total likes is your engagement ratio. This is the most important of the two parts when it comes to reaching more people through Facebook. In the instance above, there are 84 out of 5,737 people actively engaged with the posts coming out of this Facebook page, yielding a 1.5% engagement ratio. This is bad, but in many ways it’s because the engagement ratio in the automotive industry in general is bad, average around 1.75%.

The second part of the equation is the total number of people talking about the page. If 10 people are talking about a page that has a mere 50 fans, then the 20% engagement ratio isn’t going to help very much.

It’s important to understand the dynamic here, though. Some would think that having a ton of fans and a lot of people talking about it at a low ratio is fine, but it’s not. It hurts the page’s overall ability to allow the posts to be seen by locals. In other words, if a page has 100,000 fans and 2,000 people talking about it, then it has a low 2% ratio but a good total number. However, and this is often the hardest aspect of all this to understand, that low engagement ratio is still hurting the page and minimizing the potential. It’s possible to reach more local people on a page like this:

This page has fewer than the 2,000 people talking about the hypothetical 100,000 fan Facebook page, but it has a much higher potential to reach people, particularly the locals, because of the 15.1% engagement ratio. Facebook can see statistically that people are much more likely to like and engage with the content when it’s presented to them and it makes advertising and promoting the page much easier as a result.

More importantly, it allows for localization of the promotions at a massive scale. 157 people have engaged with this page recently, but a ton more locals were able to see the posts and be exposed to the messages as a result. Take a look:

As a result of getting the right type of local fans and operating a properly-structured advertising and promotions campaign, we are able to target a lot more than just those 1,040 fans who have liked the page.

Anyone can see what the engagement ratio is on a page simply by looking at the public numbers. In the automotive industry, the average is 1.75%. Anything over 4% is considered adequate. We strive to hit and stay above 10%, though we’ve seen some that sustain 30%+. It won’t last forever, but keeping it that high for a month or two means epic levels of exposure for the business messages.

2. There are Irrelevant Images on Your Wall

You shouldn’t have pictures of cats on your wall unless you’re a veterinarian. You shouldn’t have pictures of childhood memories on your wall unless you’re an individual.

That’s the point, right? Businesses post irrelevant things to their walls because they were likely told by some social media guru to try to fit in, to post viral images and ask questions that have nothing to do with business in order to get people to engage with your business page.

Here’s a quick tip: people don’t want to engage with you over irrelevant posts. They already have plenty of friends and family filling their news feeds with such things.

Here’s a more important tip: you can get much more engagement by actually being transparent, relevant, and posting the type of content that has to do with your business. It’s a hard concept to understand for some reason, but when a car dealer posts images of cool cars, they’re staying relevant. When they post images from the local area, they’re staying relevant. When they post Facebook-only oil change specials or intriguing trade ins that just hit the floor, they’re staying relevant.

When they stay relevant, they have an opportunity to fulfill the purpose of the page’s existence. When they stay relevant, they’re able to fulfill the promise that was implied when people liked the page in the first place.

People like business pages for one of two reasons:

1. They were interested in the industry and wanted to have a source on Facebook for things pertaining to that industry, from localized specials to interesting bits of information that can help them.
2. They were coaxed to like the page for bizarre reasons (we covered this recently).

Not a single person woke up and said, “I want to see funny cat pictures and reminisce about my childhood today. I think I’ll find a local business on Facebook and follow them to satisfy this need.”

Stop trying to fit in. Your Facebook page should be designed to stand out. Don’t chum up to your fans. Inform them. Educate them. Amaze them. Give them information about things that relate to your business.

3. You’re Trying to Coax People to Like Your Page with Games or Giveaways

I just posted about this yesterday so I’m not going to rehash it now.

Read: Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

4. You’re Not Getting Engagement on Individual Posts

Sorry for all the purple – trying to block out identifying content to focus on the point of this. It’s a stereotypical business Facebook page – 1300 likes but very few people liking, commenting, or sharing the posts themselves. In this example, there was a post that had 13 likes and another with 11 in the last month, but he majority had 0, 1, or 2.

There are going to be duds. It’s not possible for every post to be successful, but most of them should be. You should be averaging around 1% engagement on each post. In the example below, the page has around 900 likes, which means that on average 9 interactions should be happening with each post (likes, comments, and shares).

It got 37 likes. This is good because some posts on the page are under the 1% mark with only a handful of likes. Some will do well, particularly those that resonate with the local community the way this one did. Some will not do as well. Keeping as consistent as possible is the key. Unfortunately, most pages are performing consistently poorly.

5. You’re Not Finding the Right Mix of Conversation and Conversion

This is the only component of Facebook marketing that takes real skill and analysis. Everything else takes a little, but playing with the algorithm, monitoring the results, and tweaking the strategy are all part of finding the right mix between conversation and conversion.

Conversation is the fun stuff. Again, no cat pictures, but for a car dealer to get conversations going, they’ll want to post content that isn’t directly businesses related but that is still relevant to the industry. A Chevy dealer might post pictures of the new Corvette, for example. A Seattle dealer might post images (or better yet, ask their fans to post images) of the Space Needle. These fun posts get the community involved and allow your overall Facebook footprint to be as big as possible.

The conversion posts are all business. They’re talking about the big sale this weekend. They’re talking about the brake special from the website. They’re highlighting and individual used car that is just too amazing to miss. These get less engagement (normally but not always) but are the real reason you’re on Facebook in the first place. It’s not all about branding. You can increase business as a result of using social media and these are the posts that do it for you.

The two types of posts go hand in hand and finding the right mix is the tough part. You need to “earn” the right to post conversion content by posting enough high quality conversational content. It’s an algorithm play as well as an audience play, which means that you have to play with it. Too much conversation and you’re not getting a relevant message out to increase business. Too much conversion and people will shut you out, making your posts virtually invisible.

The example above was all about sales. Everything they were posting was about conversion which meant that very few people were actually seeing the posts. The opposite is no more useful; getting all kinds of conversations going without affecting business does nothing to help grow.

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There are other bad things as well as good things that are going on with pages, but these are the easiest way to tell in a glance whether or not you’re being effective. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or to find out what we can do to help you.

This isn’t going to be a long post (I know a lot of mine have been too long, lately) but that doesn’t make it any less important. It’s short because the concept is simple. Unfortunately, many are missing out on this easy technique.

There are plenty of types of content that you can post on Facebook, but they invariably fall into one of two categories – conversation and conversion. You’re either posting to help spark conversations that are on topic with your industry or you’re posting content designed to drive conversions of some sort to increase business. In some cases, a post can fall under both categories, those these types of posts are normally not as effective at achieving either goal.

The point of conversational posts is simply to earn the right to post conversion content. You have to earn this right from two different entities. The first is Facebook itself. The EdgeRank algorithm is very fickle. Because people are less likely to interact with content that is pushing the big sale this weekend than if they’re seeing an image of a concept Hyundai crossover, too many conversion posts can hurt you in the algorithm. Facebook knows the activities that happen on their site including a lack of activity. In other words, it’s not just those unavoidable occasions when people will hide or report your content. Your EdgeRank is hurt when people simply do nothing, when it appears in their news feed but they scroll right passed it without engaging.

The second entity for which you have to earn the right to post conversion content is the user base itself. People get fatigued. If they see post after post of “sale-sale-sale” appear on their news feed, they will eventually block you. They are much less likely to do that when the conversion posts are spread out, when there’s real conversational posts hitting their news feed and drawing their attention. Then, when they see the conversion posts, they’re less inclined to offer negative feedback because they get it. That’s one of the toughest things for businesses and marketers to accept. People get it. They know that you’re running a business and they’re accepting of the occasional conversion post as long as they hold a good sentiment towards your company and social media presence because you’ve earned their trust through strong conversational posts.

The conversion posts are the easiest to grasp but are much harder to deliver properly. It isn’t about advertising the big sale or the oil change or the individual vehicle that you just took in on trade. It’s about presenting the big sale, the oil change, or the unique vehicle you just took in on trade in a way that is engaging to them.

The example above is not ideal. It’s not a super rare find or a killer manager’s special. It’s just a car, but there’s personality in the way that it was presented. That’s one of the keys. The second key is that the conversation that ensued as a result of the post included very responsive action. Someone in the local area inquired further about it. That’s good. It’s better that the response came with instructions on how to proceed.

These types of posts would not work if that’s all that ever got posted by the dealership. Most people passed this post up because they weren’t in the market at that particular moment for a used Honda Pilot. Even those who aren’t buying today will eventually need something, but more importantly you’ll want to get engagement from those people because of EdgeRank. Someone might not be in the market, but one of their friends might be. When the person not in the market likes, shares, or comments on your posts, there’s an increased likelihood that their friend who is in the market will now see the proper posts as a result.

Mix it up. There’s no magic formula. If I were cornered with a knife to my throat and forced to answer the question about the proper mix of content I would say something like 6:1 – six conversational posts for every conversion post, but I’d be guessing and generalizing. The reality is that it’s different for every page, every market, every demographic. Some can get away with 3:1. Some can only muster 10:1. Whatever is right for your page and your business is the way to go. It’s not a copout response. We spend a lot of time determining the personality and limitations of each individual client and the ratios listed above are real-world ranges that we’ve seen and applied. The key is finding what works best for you.

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This article originally appeared on Social News Watch.

Commitment. It means different things to different people. When it comes to social media marketing and Facebook in particular, it means making the choice to work hard, keep going, and stay disciplined.

Facebook is extremely fickle. Its algorithm relies on momentum, something that dies very quickly after only a few bad posts or skipped days. It’s for this reason that businesses and marketers have to make a choice before diving in. Are they going to take it all the way or is it better to keep it slow and simple?

Both methods work at achieving their respective goals. The majority should consider going for the latter as the effort that goes into going “all the way” must be sustained indefinitely to be successful. There are plenty of strategies that work with each method, but before we get into those, here’s the difference between the two.

Keep in mind, there’s really no in between.

The Easy Road

This isn’t the “stick your head in the sand approach”. Let’s assume that you wouldn’t be reading this article if your goal is to pretend that social media doesn’t exist, that it’s a fad, or that your business cannot benefit from being on it.

The easy road is one that is only targeting interested parties. It isn’t about aggressively going after new fans. It isn’t about using Facebook advertising. It isn’t about playing the algorithm game or going for additional reach for your message. The easy road is only targeting those people who will find your Facebook page through search or through your website. This isn’t about getting into users’ news feeds.

This path takes very little time. While I would never suggest using automation such as RSS feed posts, it’s just a notch above that. With this strategy, the goal is to make sure you’re presenting a strong presence for those who find your page. It means posting text, images, links, and videos on a regular basis. Once a day is plenty but a business on this path can easily get away with a couple of posts a week.

This takes very little time and effort. Use Post Planner, Buffer, Facebook’s native scheduling tool, or any tool with a queue feature and make sure it’s loaded up. That’s it. Put a week’s worth of posts in every week, schedule the replenishing tasks once a week, and let your presence become a good representation of your business for those who proactively seek your page.

There are plenty of advantages to this style. It takes much, much less time. It requires fewer touches of your social accounts. Your posts can be easily scheduled and as long as you’re monitoring via email or alerts for inbound contacts, this method is almost foolproof.

Again, it’s important to remember that you will not be getting into news feeds. Very few people will see your posts, but those who do see them will not be disappointed by seeing and abandoned page or one that is RSS automated.

The Hard Road

The other option is to commit. It’s that simple. If you’re wanting to use facebook as a true advertising and marketing platform, you will want to be extremely active. You’ll need to learn about and keep up with the algorithm, touch your account daily (possibly multiple times per day depending on your reach), and craft content perfectly.

This is the path that most want to take because it’s aggressive. It is the way to get real exposure through Facebook, to get into news feeds and to get your message in front of as many people as possible. The key point is to understand that social media doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t take weekends off, and it knows when you’ve been away for an extended period of time.

It also requires an investment. Any expert that says Facebook can be effective in an aggressive strategy that does not include a Facebook advertising spend is trying to sell something to a potential client. It cannot be done unless you’re an A-list celebrity or a major brand. Local businesses, smaller brands, and just about any entity that is not a household name within their market cannot achieve maximum success on Facebook without spending on ads. I’d happily debate that with anyone who says something to the contrary.

The hard road requires constant monitoring and interaction. If someone comments on a post, it’s imperative that there’s a very quick response. The next day often won’t cut it. You can get more engagement when people are replied to while they’re still online and the comment is fresh to them. It’s also the quickest way to get your posts to spread quickly. When a long conversation thread can be sustained, those involved will help your post become visible on others’ feeds, they’ll tag people that they want to join the conversation, and suddenly the post has the ability to get real traction.

Most of these things are obvious to those who have been doing it for a while, but one thing that so many are missing is that you can never waste a post. There is too much algorithmic damage that can be done with bad posts. They all have to count – every single one of them. They all need a purpose whether it’s creatively delivering a business-oriented message or just posting high-quality content that can be universally liked to boost your algorithmic authority.

One can still use tools and plan out posts, but it’s important to not let them make you lazy. Just because you’re scheduling posts ahead of time doesn’t mean that you can let it sit dormant or that you can stop paying attention for a little while.

This isn’t intended to scare people. It definitely doesn’t mean that you have to live on Facebook to be successful. It’s just necessary to make the commitment to spend enough time, energy, and money to make your Facebook presence strong and to aggressively pursue greater reach. It’s not a matter of fans. The truth is that fans are a very small part of an aggressive strategy. The hard road takes you down a path where reach is 99% of the goal. The more people you can get to see your message and to communicate with you, the more success you can have.

To reach this success, you have to be willing to go all in. There is no gray area. There’s no middle ground. A halfway aggressive approach is not half as successful as the aggressive approach. It’s barely more successful than taking the safe road, which is why most businesses should opt for that path.

It’s all or nothing. Which is best for you?

Rumors always fly about Google, particularly when it comes to search. Next to Apple, Google is the beneficiary and/or victim of rumors on a regular basis. Some of them are started by others, but occasionally they're started (and confirmed) by Google itself. Such was the case last year when they hinted about the first variation of Penguin and it was the case this year with the latest update, dubbed Penguin 2.0.

Now it's here and their was a nice writeup about it on Driving Sales by Aaron Schinke of DealerFire. The advice he gives is sound and falls in line with what we've seen from this update.

The update has proven to be a very positive one for those who are doing SEO the right way. I spent an hour doing spot checks on dozens of our clients last night and found that they either kept their strong positions or moved up if they weren't #1 already (which usually means that their competitors actually moved down as a result of the update, but the net result is the same).

The point is this - SEO is still extremely valid despite the drum beat that comes every two or three months that "SEO is dead". You can search for that phrase in Google and see that new people have been putting up stories with variations of that headline since 2008. They'll keep doing it until 2018. It has been considered and always will be considered to be the case every time Google and Bing get smarter with their ranking algorithms.

Don't believe them. Ever. I promise this - if SEO really does ever die, I'll be the first to admit it. Oddly enough, I know of a sentiment engine in development that would effectively kill current SEO, but it requires quantum computing and the ability to practically read our minds to become truly effective, so we're still at least a few years away from that.

The days of effective cheap SEO are behind us. You can have a search presence for cheap but nobody can be dominant. This isn't an attempt to insult some competitors. It's an analysis of what Google has been doing for the last couple of years. They are pushing away from automation-based search optimization. They are rewarding high-quality, manual effort that brings value.

It simply can't be done on the cheap, anymore. SEO is valid and getting more valid every day. Those who deny it are simply unwilling or incapable of putting in the effort to make it happen.