Social Media Opens Doors for Dealers: Building a Car Sales Social Media Strategy

• Your customers, your staff, and other dealers are all on their phones, so a car sales social media strategy has to start by being where that attention already is.

• Busy dealers get flooded with messages on LinkedIn and elsewhere, which makes cold outreach easy to ignore.

• Mike Crothers found that pretty quickly after he started posting, doors started opening and it got easier to get into dealers' inboxes.

• Posting regularly gives people context about who you are, so your messages stop feeling cold, whether you are reaching a customer or a fellow dealer.

• MOTO(social) gives each person posting on social their own link, with leads attributed in the CRM, so you can see whose posts are producing leads.

Your customers are on their phones. So are your salespeople, your vendors, and the dealer down the street. Whether you like it or not, that is where attention lives now, and any car sales social media strategy has to start there. Mike Crothers, CEO of MOTO(acquire), puts it in five words: "Be where the attention is."

That sounds obvious, but plenty of stores still treat social as an afterthought. Someone posts a new arrival now and then, nobody on the floor shares it, and the page sits quiet. Mike's own experience says the payoff from showing up is bigger than most dealers expect, and it goes well beyond moving units.

Why should car dealers post on social media?

Mike's short answer: "Everyone's on their phone, whether we like it or not. So let's be on there." Your buyers scroll in the morning, at lunch, and on the couch at night. If your store and your people are not in that feed, someone else is.

But the part of Mike's story worth paying attention to is not about consumers at all. Before he was on social media, he was trying to reach dealers directly to ask for advice. A lot of them were hard to get hold of. As he says, they "get so many messages on LinkedIn and stuff like that." He understood why. A dealer principal or GM gets pitched all day long.

Then he started posting. "It seemed like pretty quickly after I started posting, the door started opening," Mike says. "It started being easier to get in these people's inbox."

What posting actually changes

Think about it from the receiving end. A message from a stranger is easy to ignore. A message from someone whose posts you have seen in your feed, whose thinking you already know a little, is not really cold anymore. You have context before you ever open it.

That is the real value Mike is describing. Posting is not just broadcasting. It builds familiarity, and familiarity is what gets a reply. The same logic applies inside your store. A salesperson a customer has already seen on social is not a stranger when that customer finally reaches out. A GM who shares what he is learning is easier for peers, vendors, and future hires to approach.

Building a car sales social media strategy that opens doors

You do not need a big production to get started. Based on what Mike describes, a few principles matter most:

• Show up where people already are. Pick the platforms your customers and your peers actually use and be there consistently. Attention is on the phone, so that is where you go.

• Post as a person, not just a logo. Mike's doors opened because people got to know him. Dealership personal branding on social media works the same way for your salespeople and managers.

• Start, then keep going. Mike said things changed "pretty quickly" after he started posting. That only happens if you actually start, and it only lasts if you stay with it.

• Use it for networking, not just inventory. Social media networking for car dealers means connecting with other operators, getting advice, and building relationships that pay off later, not only listing cars.

For more on how stores are putting their people on social, see our Dealership Social Selling videos.

Turning posts into tracked leads with MOTO(social)

Once your team is posting, the first question every GM asks is whether it is working. Without tracking, social stays a feel-good activity that is hard to manage and harder to justify.

MOTO(social) gives each person posting on social their own link, with leads attributed in the CRM. When a customer comes in through a salesperson's post, you can see whose post it was. That lets you recognize the people who are putting in the work and coach the ones who are not.

Mike's point is simple: be where the attention is. If your team is going to be there anyway, make sure the leads they create land in your CRM with their name on them.