We’re at a time in our history where we see people spending more time on social media platforms than ever before.

The growth of social has brought us to the question of which ones offer the most impact for car dealers? It’s important that you invest your marketing budget in the right places and find the highest returns from the money you’re investing in marketing and advertising.

You Should Have a Facebook Page but Might Find it Expensive

One of the most popular social media platforms is Facebook. You probably have a personal page and connect with family and friends easily. Why wouldn’t it be just as easy to have your car dealership features on Facebook? Shouldn’t you simply change your posts to public and see that everyone can see your content? It’s not quite that easy.

Advertising with Facebook can be a bit expensive at times and you have to pay to get your name out there. Photos are compressed on Facebook, which also means you’ll have to adjust some of the settings to make sure your cars look good on the site. You need to use Facebook to advertise, likely nearly every one of your customers is on this site, but you need to know that you will have to budget for the cost.

Can Twitter Bring More Customers to Your Doorstep?

The short posts and easy linking that Twitter offers makes it one of the most useful social media platforms for your car dealership. You need to have a professional Twitter page, and once you understand that fact, it will be easier to figure out how to use it. More car sales can be mapped back to a Twitter post than any other social media site, but you need to know the limitations as well.

With images being such a large part of what you need to effectively market the vehicles you sell, having to use links for all of your images can be tiresome. Even so, you can probably work with this limitation considering the rest of the Twitter world is faced with the same challenge.

You Might Like Using Flickr

For the most part, Flickr is going to be a social site that doesn’t offer much more than the support needed for some of your other pages. You can link to an album easily and include it in a post on Facebook, but it’s not free. For personal use, Flickr can be great and affordable, for a car dealership, the finite number of images can be tiresome.

The audience on Flickr is much smaller than what you find for Facebook and Twitter. If you use Flickr as a support site, you’ll get the most out of it and enjoy the affordable price and the images you can easily offer your new customers.

Instagram is one of the Most Focused Social Media Platforms

Instagram is easy to use and it can be the most impactful of the social sites to give you the return you desire for your advertising. You won’t find features on Instagram that cause it to be hard to use, this platform is images and videos, which makes it simple and straightforward. You can keep up with your followers through their stories and by offering your own as well.

There are very few drawbacks to Instagram. This site does what it says and it does it better than any other. You’ll love sharing photos, videos, and stories through this site. If you’re using several images for vehicles and events, you’ll be pleased to have Instagram by your side.

Google+, the Long Lost Social Media Platform

No, Google+ hasn’t truly been lost, but there aren’t as many users on this platform than on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. With that in mind, you won’t want to ditch the others, but you can use this platform to help you reach more followers. This is a great platform for the broad exposure and it doesn’t appear to be as redundant as the marriage between Facebook and Instagram.

If you’re trying to offer amazing images of the vehicles you’re going to see or of an event that you hosted, Google+ doesn’t compress your photos the same way that Facebook does. You might find this site to be much more affordable than the more popular sites. It’s important to be present on the right social media platforms to reach and engage with your customers.

Using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are no-brainers. Review Flickr as a support site and see if you can gain some traction with Google+ to reach users on a platform that isn’t quite as popular but still has a lot of benefits for your dealership.