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Judging by the dealers we follow on Twitter and Facebook most do a pretty good job at promoting themselves and engaging with current and prospective customers.
Those who do it well post regularly with meaningful and personalised content, often with a strong local flavour and with supporting images.
However, many just use social media as a blatant extension of the marketing department with impersonal content aimed at drumming up interest for whatever the current promotion happens to be.
We wanted to apply a little science to finding out just how good the biggest dealers in the Motor Trader Top 200 are at social media engagement and asked Headstream, the content marketing agency, to research them and report back.
The research shows how many dealers have found they can use social media channels to differentiate themselves from competitors and help customers to get a feel for the culture of their company, as well as read reviews from other customers.
Broadcast platform
Many customers will view these social media channels before they search other parts of the internet, in a bid to gauge customer experience and satisfaction. They can also provide a valuable broadcast platform for potential new customers, as well as a real time customer service platform for existing customers.
This ranking analyses social activity and levels of engagement among the UK’s biggest dealer groups, across both Facebook and Twitter, to produce a leaderboard of the UK’s most social dealer groups.
We wanted to know how dealer groups, rather than individual sites, address their social media needs so gave Headstream details of the top 10 groups by turnover in the Motor Trader Top 200. It then researched the individual brands rather than the holding companies behind them: so Evans Halshaw and Stratstone, rather than Pendragon; and Bristol Street Motors and Macklin Motors, rather than Vertu.
This meant excluding Inchcape, a top 10 regular, because it does not operate a group-wide Facebook page or Twitter account, choosing instead to devolve its social media activities to its national network of dealers.
With 10 brands identified the research was conducted for a month-long period from 3 January 2015 to 3 February 2015, which avoided the peak of a plate-change.
The task then was to identify the top five performers and explain how they were reaching their high engagement levels.
Engagement rates
Headstream analysed the engagement rates on each of the brand’s official Facebook and Twitter pages during this time frame. For the purpose of this report, an engagement is a like, comment or share on Facebook and an @ reply or a retweet on Twitter.
Following this, Headstream awarded one point for a like, two for a comment, and three for a share. For Twitter it awarded an @ reply with one point and a retweet with two points. These figures were then totalled up to determine their overall rankings (see table below).
The research found that dealers tend to use their social media channels as a base for customer service, reviews and driving loyalty through active engagement. Consequently content largely features pictures of new stock and images of happy customers with their new vehicle. Generally speaking Facebook tactics focused on sharing image posts which are often also re-purposed for Twitter. While Twitter activity tended to deal in more one-to-one engagements, with dealerships using the channel to respond to Tweets and customer service issues.
Top five dealer groups
1. Evans Halshaw: The most popular content on the Evans Halshaw Facebook page, in terms of engagement, is images of people collecting their new cars from showrooms. The posts are relevant to the audience and show the dealers at work, with images of satisfied customers and product shots in its showrooms. The images often name the people featured in the photo to add a more personal dimension to the feed.
The winter competition from Evans Halshaw (see below) was the most successful post on Twitter over the period of research with 762 retweets. This shows posts with a clear call to action are generally well received by social media users, and the incentive of a prize, in this case a Pirelli winter car care kit, always increases engagement. The competition ran over a number of days and the post was retweeted each day, each time causing a spike in engagements. This competition is largely responsible for Evans Halshaw achieving the number one position.
Its Twitter page also has the largest number of followers (11,000) of those included in the ranking.
2. Mercedes-Benz Retail Group: Mercedes-Benz Retail Group takes a slightly different approach on Facebook, often posting stock photos of its more unusual derivatives (see above) or top-end models. The images tend to be aspirational and reflect the luxury lifestyle that the brand wishes to convey but Headstream felt the feed was less personal and more like a catalogue showcasing the vehicle range. However, it clearly knows what its audience likes as it has the most popular Facebook page in the ranking with 17,045 likes.On Twitter, the group takes a similar approach, posting interesting or aspirational shots of its range. Other content includes the #guessthemercedes campaign, where an image of a very small part of a car is posted and followers are challenged to guess the model. The amount of conversation and interaction between the group and the community is notably higher on Twitter with Mercedes often replying to followers who particulate in #guessthemercedes and retweeting posts mentioning the group.
3. Stratstone: On Facebook Stratstone, Pendragon’s prestige dealer brand, features a variety of content, with the most successful posts relating to new models available at its dealerships across the country. They are usually cars that are slightly out of the ordinary, with custom features or additional extras. The most common engagement with these posts is simple post ‘likes’.The Twitter feed for the group replicates the content posted on Facebook, and often achieves a number of @ replies in response. The post that received the highest level of engagement was related to a competition winner whose Twitter handle was tagged in the post (see above)
4. TrustFord: Unsurprisigly the post with the highest levels of engagement on the TrustFord Facebook page was the Ford Mustang product launch, which received an above average number of shares. Interestingly, Headstream found this type of content is infrequent on the page and perhaps highlights a particular area of interest for the community. The majority of posts on the feed are links to videos on YouTube and images from events hosted by Ford, such as Ford Tech Live. For a consumer-facing page it has a more of business-to-business feel.Twitter content is a combination of repurposed Facebook content and a number of retweets from the main Ford UK account and other relevant Twitter feeds. The post that received the most engagement featured an image of delegates at a conference. It could be that those featured in the image were motivated to retweet the post. This was also the only post from TrustFord to receive any @ replies
5. Arnold Clark: Despite having the second largest Facebook community, Arnold Clark comes in fifth place in Headstream’s rankings. This could be due to the infrequent nature of the posts and therefore less opportunity for engagement. The content that achieved the highest level of engagement was a competition post to win weekly fruit hampers (see above), which included a clear call to action to like the post.The feed features a number of other competitions, as well as new products and links to articles hosted on the brand’s website. On Twitter, the feed features a combination of announcements and responses to users who tweet feedback about their customer service experience or customer satisfaction. A tweet about the group being the first dealer in the UK to offer an online sign language service received the highest number of retweets for the period analysed.
Steve Sponder, Headstream’s CEO rounds up the key findings of the research and provides pointers for dealers to maximise their social media channels
With dealer visits in decline digital and social media search form a key part of the consideration and evaluation stage of the customer journey for car purchase.
Car dealerships have taken advantage of social media to distribute their content in the right channels, to reach the right audience at the right time in order to address the search and evaluation activity of prospective customers – and indeed satisfy the loyalty stage of customers.
Specifically for the consider and evaluation stages of the customer journey, Facebook and Twitter as platforms can assist car dealerships with search as Facebook content ranks high in search engine result pages (SERP) rankings.
- Customers sharing in the form of advocacy content (testimonials and personal examples of a great experience) may also help to nudge prospective customers along the purchase journey.
- It is evident from this research that car dealers need to fully understand their digital/social customer journey in more detail and try to create compelling, relevant content that meets the needs of both prospective and existing customers via Facebook and Twitter.
Evans Halshaw the number one dealer group, uses a lot of visual content in the form of pictures of happy customers collecting their cars. It has capitalised on the opportunity to use advocacy content here and encourage people to share their good experiences online.
In terms of Facebook this content is largely promotional but people interact with the posts, so it improves the overall performance of the page and receives good engagement, especially with shares.
The majority of dealer groups studied feature videos produced by car manufacturers, but there is an opportunity to invest in producing their own entertaining video content as this content performs well within both platforms.
- There is an obvious lack of bespoke content from dealerships: this could be a resource/budget issue or they may be restricted by the digital toolkits provided by the car manufacturers themselves.
- As with similar research we have conducted for different sectors, it is obvious that competitions and promotion posts are the highest performing in terms of engagement. However, brands need to be careful with promotions as Facebook is now penalising brands whose promotion is out of context, affecting overall post reach and limiting engagement. Facebook and Twitter are becoming platforms that are focussed on paid media.
- Facebook is now predominantly a paid media platform with organic reach dwindling – a trend digital specialists are referring to as “Facebook Zero”. If dealers want to increase both reach and engagement with their content they need to look at their paid social media strategy.
