If there’s one major flaw with the way that many businesses use automation tools, it’s that they’re not able to properly control the flow of content from its longest form down to it’s shortest form. This is unfortunate because using RSS feeds to post to Facebook and Twitter from a blog, for example, doesn’t save much time at all but minimizes the effectiveness of the networks.

It’s all about flow. It’s about taking advantage of the strengths of the various networks will not falling into the traps that each allows.

Let’s take a look at an example of content flow. In this case, we’re going to work it down from a standard piece of website content rather than a blog post or YouTube video. Those are easier. If you can master the creative elements of promoting standard website content, the other types of content will be a piece of cake.

Original content

This is where it all starts. Here, we see a sales special. It’s not the type of content that any social media pro in his or her right mind would ever consider promoting through social media. They wouldn’t want to be accused of spamming. They wouldn’t want to turn of their fans. They would believe in most cases that this is the type of content that had no chance of resonating with a social media audience.

They would be wrong.

There is tons of content on a business website that has absolutely no chance of seeing the light of day on social media, but there are other types of content that simply need a little bit of playfulness, cleverness, and creativity to tweak them into an appropriate position. Take a look at that special. Do you see anything that you would be able to latch onto if you were trying to promote it on social media?

Put it on Facebook and Google+

If you were to say something to the effect of, “Take a look at our amazing specials – Honda Civic is only $8 a day,” you would watch your posts get reported, blocked, and hidden into oblivion. You would actually do algorithmic damage to your posts and your profile in general.

If, however, you made it clever and worded it in a way that people would be able to relate to, you could still get the message out with a reduced risk of negative sentiment. In the case above, the post had a modest 16 likes and the link was clicked 32 times. It’s not a home run compared to some other examples out there, but it’s a realistic expectation that a local business could achieve with the right techniques.

Be creative. Branch out. Put a little bit of effort into it. It doesn’t take a lot – this particular campaign took about 2 minutes to craft and post. It’s worth the time spent.

Put it on Twitter and Pinterest

This is both the easiest and hardest part. It’s the easiest because it’s only 140 characters. It’s the hardest because you have to take full advantage of those 140 characters and craft it in the most appropriate way possible.

On both Twitter and Pinterest, getting people’s attention is the key. The firehose on both networks has such a wide stream today that there’s a good chance the majority of your messages are being seen by very few people. This is where hashtags come into play and it’s the main reason that automating Tweets for anything important is one of the silliest activities out there.

A Tweet takes seconds, literally. Is it worth making something almost completely ineffective for the sake of saving seconds?

In the example above, the post was highlighted with a couple of different hashtags. The first is relatively worthless other than getting people’s attention from within their feed. The mind is trained to look for things unconsciously that are important to that person, so if someone is looking for a car and is considering a Honda Civic, they don’t have to read it consciously for it to catch their eye.

The second is one of the hooks. As Twitter search and hashtag use continue to grow exponentially (much faster than the site itself), it’s important to have at least one keyword that can attract your targets. In this case, the Tweet is targeting the local state. It could have as easily been a city, a lifestyle (#green, #economical), or even something slightly off topic (#coffee).

The most important part about Twitter (but not Pinterest) is that you can take a message and repost it over time. It’s good to come up with a couple of different variations, but for the most part as long as you’re spreading out the repetition of the message, you can reach more people without spamming them.

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Applying proper content flow strategies allows you to get the most out of the content that you produce as well as the content that’s already on your website. Crafting the messages around the mediums is harder than just putting them into a feed machine, but the results can be exponentially improved as a result. That’s not to say that nothing should be automated. It’s just that important things should not be.”Flow” image courtesy of Shutterstock.

There are two frames of mind amongst search marketing professionals when it comes to major updates such as the Google Penguin update last year and the upcoming Penguin 2.0 algorithm update. Some start to panic as they’ve seen these algorithm updates force companies to make major changes. In some cases, companies have had to close down because adjusting was just too much to bare. The other perspective is that these changes bring the game of optimization more in line with quality over quantity, strategy over brute force, and perhaps most importantly, art over science.

That’s what’s expected with the upcoming update based upon a mixture of common sense and some pointed Tweets by Google’s spam czar, Matt Cutts. The pursuit of quality links instead of having a large inbound link portfolio has been the focus of Google (and Bing) for over a year now and the coming update will likely be more of the same.

The art aspect of it all comes down to getting more value out of higher-quality content that can be enjoyed by real people versus meaningless links outside of content or on sites that have no real value to the search engines. Before, it was easy to stuff links on as many sites as possible to get the juice necessary for SEO. It made it to where the science was dominant – automated platforms, bulk link submission tools, and link generating scripts once ruled the search marketing world. Today, one strong article or infographic on a high-value website can get websites more coveted link juice than literally thousands of low quality links. This is where the artistry comes into play.

As businesses and marketing agencies continue to hone their skills and progress their strategies, it’s important that they understand this dynamic. It’s no longer a good thing to have dozens of link builders hitting up websites. Today and into the future, strong content creators with the connections to get their content placed on relevant and trusted sites are the most sought after resources in the industry. Everyone else is simply spamming up the system and Penguin 2.0 will punish those who do not adapt.

The KBG. Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti. The Committee for State Security for the former Soviet Union was one of the most feared agencies in history. Thankfully, this post isn’t about them.

Here, we’re going to talk about a different type of KGB, the type that is plaguing social media on pages across the internet, hurting businesses and striking fear into the hearts of knowledgeable internet marketing professionals around the world. It’s the type of bad posts that were once thought to be effective but that have been debunked time and time again, yet so many businesses (and even vendors) continue to post them.

Today’s social media KBG is this:

• Kitties
• Games/Giveaways
• Bogus Questions

If you or your vendor are still using these things, stop immediately. They aren’t helping. In fact, they are hurting the cause of using social media as a proper advertising venue through which to increase business. Here’s why:

Kitties

Don’t misunderstand. I have nothing against felines. By “kitties” I’m referring to the type of posts that have absolutely nothing to do with business but that are designed to become popular on social media for their general appeal. They are often funny, sometimes cute, and almost always fluffy (not in the feline way).

Do they work? If the goal is strictly to get more likes in an effort to improve Facebook EdgeRank, then technically they can be effective. The problem is two-fold. First, they turn many people off. They get enough kitty posts from their friends and family. Many people don’t like it when they see business pages post irrelevant kitty pictures because it is insincere. “You’re a business, not a buddy.”

The second and arguably more important reason is that your business has plenty of relevant content to post. Stay focused. A car dealer should be posting cars. There are plenty of awesome cars that work just fine to get engagement. Local businesses have a world of potential content surrounding them in their community and within proximity to the store. Kitty images are simply not necessary for driving engagement and the risk of turning people off as a result is simply too high to dismiss.

Games and Giveaways

Just as with kitties, games and giveaways intended to inflate the fan counts on the various social networks (Facebook in particular) can be effective in achieving its goal. Just as with kitties, it’s not necessary and can have dramatic negative consequences.

Who wants fans to like their page so they have a chance to win something? What are the chances of getting any engagement from that person? How many people do not win the great prize and get a negative sentiment about a business right from the start?

Most importantly, it’s just too easy to acquire high quality fans through transparent advertising to give games or giveaways any consideration. Through transparency, pages are able to grow at a much better pace. Is it faster? Sometimes, but not always. That doesn’t matter. I’ll take 100 fans who came in for the right reasons and with the right expectations over 1000 fans hoping to get something for free any day.

Bogus Questions

Of the three components of KGB-style fan acquisition techniques, this is arguably the most annoying. You don’t care and we know it. There, I said it.

No business outside of a movie theater cares what their fans’ favorite movies are. It’s so apparent to anyone who’s been on Facebook for more than a month that companies who ask irrelevant questions are doing so to get you to talk to them. It’s a desperate move that is apparently so to the people who see the questions.

If you’re going to ask questions (which is a good thing when done right), keep it relevant. Keep it in line with what your business does. Ask questions that you might ask a customer if you were sitting with them in the waiting room or met them at a party. Don’t ask questions that are simply there to drive engagement. People know what you’re doing and they don’t like it.

Will some people respond to any question? Of course? Is this a good thing? No.

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There are too many transparent and effective methods to get fans and increase engagement. Using these types of techniques is so antiquated that I can’t believe there are still companies that use them.

There’s a case against Twitter and Pinterest that is being waged by some in the automotive industry. They’ll say that there simply isn’t a good return on investment, that they aren’t worth messing with because it’s just too hard to find a benefit from them. This is true until you look at one major factor: time.

Twitter and Pinterest require very little time to maintain and keep vibrant. Before we get into the ways that dealers can streamline their efforts to make them more suited for a proper ROI, let’s first take a look at the three major aspects of them that make them worthwhile:

1. Time Driven Algorithm – Unlike Facebook and Google+, the Pinterest and Twitter feeds are completely time driven. When you post something, it appears in the feeds of your followers immediately. Over time, they move down. This is a good thing for their purpose because they’re ideal for getting real-time engagement.
2. Communication – At the end of the day, they are great as communication tools. Twitter allows you to communicate with people about ideas and events while Pinterest allows you to communicate visually.
3. Google Loves Them – If there’s one major reason to improve your Twitter and Pinterest posting habits, it’s Google. From a social signals perspective, they are adored.

Now that we have that covered, let’s go over a proper posting and monitoring strategy that can streamline it down so they aren’t a waste of time.

Quick Visit Twice a Day

Three minutes. That’s all it takes to keep a strong Twitter and Pinterest presence. If it helps you sell on car a quarter, it was worth it. If it helps you get your pages indexed and ranked better so that you sell more than one extra car a quarter, you’re seeing better ROI than anything else you could have possibly done.

Log into Twitter. Check for and reply to Direct Messages. Check for and reply to @replies. Post something. It’s 140 characters. It doesn’t take much effort.

Log into Pinterest. Check your recent activity. It will be mostly repins of your posts, but see if there are any comments. Pin or repin something. It’s easy.

That’s it.

Tools

For Twitter, I prefer Buffer. It’s super quick, there’s no need to mess with timing because it uses a queue, and it shortens all of the links for you as you post. The best part is that it can be a Chrome or Firefox plugin which means that you don’t have to visit the app itself. As you’re browsing throughout the day, you can Buffer it very easily.

Regardless of which tool you use, be sure that you keep your queue relatively full. While I don’t recommend planning your Tweets weeks in advance, you can definitely stay ahead of the game so that on days when you simply don’t have the time to mess with it, at least you have content going up.

A quick note about automation – I never recommend feed posting. In other words, setting any RSS feed to autopost, even if it’s your own blog, is a mistake. From sources that you don’t control, feed posts means that your posts aren’t manually vetted. People can tell. It also means that if someone makes a mistake and posts something that is either inappropriate or a mistake, your feed posting program will get it onto your Twitter feed regardless. I remember seeing a car dealer Tweet a post that said something to the effect of “Empire Avenue verification post 2342hkhk!kj32&hh”.

Regarding your own blog, you should be posting it to Twitter manually. It’s your content so you should highlight it appropriately. Use hashtags. Ask for feedback. Make the title more Twitter-appropriate. It bugs me when people auto-feed their own blog posts because it saved them seconds while costing them an opportunity to truly highlight the important content appropriately.

Lastly, don’t feed your Facebook page posts onto Twitter or visa versa. Not everything that goes on Facebook is appropriate for Twitter. More importantly, it simply doesn’t save much time. If you post something to Facebook that also works on Twitter, do it manually. Seconds, folks. That’s all it takes.

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They don’t take much time. There’s simply no reason to not include Twitter and Pinterest into your social media strategy. Done properly, they can enhance more than just your social presence. They can help with your website rankings, your blog traffic, and the general perceptions that people have about your dealership. We didn’t even get into the more advanced ways that you can use these sites to promote your business. At this point, I’d be happy if dealers were simply using them on a regular basis.

Over the past several months, we’ve been doing a ton of research in the automotive industry about how dealers perceive social media marketing. It’s something that has both thrilled and alarmed us because the results have been greatly mixed. On one hand, many dealers are starting to realize that social media is more than just a fluffy form of marketing that has not demonstrable ROI, a perception that had been growing in 2011 and 2012. Those tides have turned. However, the one alarming piece of information we discovered is that many dealers are considering social media to be a “checkbox item” for reputation management. In other words, if their reputation management provider offers social media, they’re covered.

Unfortunately, this is a bad trend. There are some pretty strong reputation management services available today. They perform some of the right activities that can be performed on the dealership’s behalf when it comes to getting more positive reviews on sites like Google Local and Yelp. The problem is that most of the social components that we’ve seen in these products and services are lacking quality and true return on investment.

It’s much the same battle that we have fought when it comes to search engine optimization. Almost all web vendors offer SEO, but must are simply not that good at it. Again, SEO should not be a checkbox item for a website any more than an engine should be a checkbox item for a car. Nobody goes out and says, “I like the way the car looks and it has all of the seats that I need. Does it have an engine? Okay, good, I’ll take it!”

Back to social media. The automotive industry has, for some reason, lumped reputation management and social media marketing into the same budget, the same type of product. This is very far from the truth. It’s a little discouraging because the effort put into a proper social media marketing strategy and the campaigns associated with it are of utmost importance and having a social media presence that is not aggressive, that acts as a checkbox to be clicked just to say it’s present for the dealersthip, is a huge mistake. Social media is growing so rapidly in both mindshare and timeshare. More people are on it and thinking about it. They’re spending more time on it than ever before. To dismiss it is a problem.

Reputation management is important. It acts as a way that dealers can protect their potential when it comes to business. People who are actively considering doing business with a dealership can be turned off as a result of bad reviews. It’s not common, but it’s present and should be treated appropriately. If having a strong reputation management service can help to save one or two deals a month, it’s probably worth the investment.

Social media, on the other hand, is proactive. It’s intended to take people and get them into the dealership and/or onto the dealer’s website. Even when it fails to do that, the fallback benefit is in the branding, getting the name and logo of the dealership in front of as many local people as possible as many times as possible to make the dealership a top-of-mind consideration when it’s time to buy a car or have service done.

If anything, reputation management should be the checkbox item. Social media needs much more attention and bad social media marketing partners can do more harm than good. Vet them carefully.