We’ve had some discussions internally about the idea that dealers should have social media coverage 7-days per week. It has been our opinion since the beginning that social media doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take weekends off. Is this a necessity in the automotive industry?
Posting on the weekend is easy. Even if people are off on the weekends, scheduling on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is easy both through native Facebook as well as through tools for the other networks. We also know that people are checking social media, posting, and interacting with dealers more on weekends than any time during the week. Lastly, we know that many dealerships are selling cars on weekends. For some, the weekends are the best days of the week for sales.
Now that we have that established, we’ve also found that the types of posts you put out on weekends can be different. They can be more fun when that’s appropriate. They can be focused on sales when there is something special going on such as sales events. Perhaps the most important difference is that there’s often enough going on within the community to give dealers plenty of content from which to pull. There are festivals, shows, sporting events, and charitable activities happening in the community and the weekend is a great time to highlight it all.
Here’s the problem. Most dealers that we watch (and it’s a lot of them) tend to not post at all on the weekends. Sometimes it’s the dealers themselves who are doing the posting. At other times, we see that it’s a company who handles social media throughout the week for dealers, only to leave the hole on the weekends.
The data and common sense tell us that we’re doing it the right way, but we take pride in pulling opinions from those in and outside of the automotive industry. It is the foundation of our company to be open-minded when appropriate and to innovate at a faster rate than the various platforms (and our competitors) can, so this is why I pose the question.
Dear reader, what do you think about social media on the weekends? Is it something that we should continue doing or is there a valid reason to stop?