As a result, she said, Horne is seeing a lift in engagement with unpaid social posts across channels and has started to hear from customers who saw a video online.
"Anybody who's been in car dealers for any length of time was taught some sort of step to the sale," she said. "Everybody has these steps, and those were always the first steps — meet and greet, sell yourself, sell the dealership and build rapport. And I suddenly realized that [social] was the spot where you could do that."
Simmons, 42, spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle about her group's social media strategy during the pandemic and inventory shortage. Here are edited excerpts.
On the importance of having a social strategy:
Social has kind of been a really hard spot because for the longest time, we told people, "Take pictures with your customers and post it online." But ultimately, how is that really showcasing why somebody should buy from you? All you're saying is that somebody else bought from you. But that's not really sharing the message of why you, a different consumer, should buy from me. So that then transitioned my thought process into: We need to find ways to connect that messaging to the consumer in relevant ways so that by the time they hit our website and they're comparing different dealerships, they will have already gotten to know us.
Most people know that within Facebook, you might have 500 friends. But do you see 500 people's worth of stuff in your feed? You don't. You only see the people's stuff that you engage with on a consistent basis. Well, the same thing works for companies. So if you're trying to build organic content, your customers will actually probably never see much of your content because they don't highly engage with you. So one of the things that I realized we needed to do was to get our customers to favorite our pages. So if they favorite us, then we basically tell Facebook that we're best friends. And so that ensures that my customers now will always see our content. And we've done that in ways by putting up our service specials, things like that.
On Horne Auto Group's strategy:
You have to actually have a presence in every single channel that's out there. So how do you go about doing that and making the content authentic? So the way that worked for me is, I actually have said to get a social champion. Have somebody that's actually in your stores on a fairly consistent basis, and have everyone within those stores share content via their own personal cellphone to that person, who then becomes your poster. And then come up with a strategy of exactly what you want to say and when you want to say it.
I hired my son, who's in college, and his girlfriend to be my social champions. So they don't have to be a Monday-through-Friday kind of job. They actually come in Tuesdays and Thursdays and go to all the stores and collect content, but then they receive content all week and then are able to schedule and post through all the channels throughout the course of the week.
