Some have suggested this might be a good opportunity for auto dealers, however I am not convinced that Twitter is a place worth spending time for auto dealers.

Twitter in an of itself offers limited advertising potential, limited primarily to big mainstream brands, primarily celebrities. The only players in the automotive space I can see benefiting from Twitter advertising would be the OEMs and the big third-party classified sites such as Cars.com, Edmunds, etc.

For auto dealers, the goal is almost always incremental sales and so the ads you would have to run would be the Twitter equivalent to your car commercials advertising how you are the best in customer service and that you offer the best prices that nobody can beat, all bunched into a 140 character Tweet. Studies show that when it comes to social media, solicitous advertising does not deliver.

So what will work for sponsored Tweets? Who knows? Does anybody even see what people Tweet? Unless somebody specifically mentions you in a Tweet, the bulk of Tweets published go unnoticed. Sponsoring a Tweet won’t change that.

If you are inclined to give it a whirl for your dealership, mosey on over to this post by PCG Marketing for a visual how-to guide for getting set up with the program. And if you do, let us know how its working for your dealership by posting your comments here.

Up until the advent of the web, and specifically the advent of blogs and RSS, content was mostly produced in print for magazines and newspapers. It was also produced on the radio, television, and on the big screen (film), on vinyl, CD, etc. The best content was syndicated or distributed across the globe for others to consume. This of course necessitated a large audience, funding, and network and distribution channels.

Today is different. You can launch a blog in a matter of minutes, publish a post, and voila, your content can technically be viewed by just about anyone with access to the Web. Or you can record a video on your phone and upload it to YouTube, yada yada. However, because of this ease and access to publishing content, the stakes and the name of the game have changed. The world is now more full of more information which makes it that much harder to get your message across and appealing to others.

For decades, auto dealers did not have to think much about content because they could purchase advertising in any of the mediums they chose. Dealers were not expected to produce TV shows, radio shows, movies, or albums.

But today dealers are being pressured to produce quality original content. Why is this? Could it be that because when it comes to the Internet, display advertising has proven much less effective than content marketing? If so, could that be a sign that display advertising in traditional mass media has always been ineffective, or it could be a sign that the Internet user responds differently to advertising? I vote for the latter.

That said, what type of content should a dealership be producing today in lieu of or in addition to display advertising? Even more importantly, where should this content be published, and how often should you post to your blog?

In our White Paper Blogging 101 for Car Dealers, we introduce 5 different types of content that an auto dealership can be producing. They are spelled out below:

1. Product and Service Information
2. Employee information, e.g. bios, honors, awards, etc.
3. Customer Information, e.g. testimonials,
4. Dealership Events and Promotions
5. Community Events and Activities

These might seem obvious, but the challenge dealerships face today is how to form a process that produces all this type of information in a way that is profitable for the dealership by being efficient and effective at selling cars and driving new business from current and non-existent customers.

Download our free White Paper today for to learn why your dealership wants to be blogging and how you can create an effective content marketing strategy for your dealership. You will be introduced to some key concepts related to blogging, micro-blogging, and social media as it pertains to car dealers and you will also receive a free getting started guide to AutoConverse.com which is the automotive local marketing site we recently launched that offers dealers a free tool for syndicating content into the AC network in a way that promotes your dealership and your personal brand.

Blogging for car dealers is something I personally have been doing now for dealerships over the past four years. I have plenty to share on the subject and am happy to work with any dealer that has a genuine interest in utilizing our free tools to get a leg up on the competition. You can contact me directly via phone at 1-877-873-0583 or by contacting me through one of your preferred social media sites. I am Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and dealerElite. I look forward to hearing from you.

Photo courtesy of LayOutSparks.com

One question I hear more often than others is, “How often should I post to my blog?” But to answer this question there are so many other related factors to consider it will take you burrowing down a deep rabbit hole of other similar topics, such as:

1. Why would a car dealer want to blog?
2. What is blogging and how is it different from micro-blogging and social media?
3. What type of content should you have on your dealership blog?
4. And of course, how often should you be posting blogs?

To address these other important considerations, I started on an e-book white paper of sorts today. It introduces these as topics from a strategic marketing point of view and how each ties in with how often you want to be publishing content and information in general.

Chances are, your dealership is using at least one or more forms of blogging, micro-blogging, and/or social media tools. One can not answer the frequency question without first knowing which blogging platform is in question, and what the strategy is behind the content being put on it.

You can answer this qualitatively though…

As an example, you certainly do not want to put vehicle specials, or service specials, on your Facebook wall every day or multiple times a day. This is a sure way to make your Facebook marketing strategy ineffective. However, you do if possible want to be on Facebook every day, as often as possible that is good for your brand, keeping in mind your ROI.

For the sake of argument, let’s define things such as Facebook and Twitter as micro-blogging tools, otherwise known as Social Media. Also for the sake of argument, let’s define “blog” as the conventional dealership blog which runs on say WordPress or Blogger and is on its own sub domain or directory of the dealership website, e.g. blog.mydealershipsite.com or mydealershipsite.com/blog.

Strategically, the marketing objectives are similar. You want to increase exposure of your dealership and drive traffic to your dealership website. You also want to add value to the customer experience through time, and both blogs and social media are effective tools for doing so.

As for the actual frequency, that depends on the type of content being produced and to which platform. This is another important element to your  content marketing strategy. You MUST be producing quality original content that people will SHARE. If you are not doing this, then you can only really be micro-blogging. This is good for building credibility and managing your reputation, but without original content on your blog it will be difficult to drive consistent traffic to your blog and website, and it will be near impossible for people to share anything because you haven’t created anything.

Creating quality original content that people will share is a great and growing challenge today for auto dealers that want to be and compete in the game with auto shoppers. This is large in part why we created the site AutoConverse.com, to give auto shoppers a way to engage with their local dealers on equal playing turf, if you as a dealer chose to service customers this way. And I see no reason why you  should not want to. It will become more important as advertising and technology evolve. The information you want from them will become increasingly more valuable, because they will have ways to protecting it better.

I will do a series of posts that explores these topics in more depth and make it available as a free download. You can sign up now for your free copy by joining our mailing list to become a free member. We will be sending everyone a copy it that is already a free or premium member, and it will be included at the time of sign up for people moving forward.

Apparently, spammers have found a new way to get higher rankings on Google. The trick involves hacked websites and the canonical tag. Is your website at risk? What can you do to avoid this?

What exactly has happened?

In an online forum, webmasters reported a new spam method. Hackers inserted the canonical tag on websites of other people:

“I came across a website with canonical tags setup on all of their pages and they were pointing to a spam site. I suspect someone hacked in and changed the canonical tags to siphon link juice.

Now that cross cross-domain canonical tags are supported I would not be surprised if this becomes more common. The canonical tag is a small line of code that is easy to overlook despite its large implications.”

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed this in a Twitter tweet: “A recent spam trend is hacking websites to insert rel=canonical pointing to hacker’s site. If U suspect hacking, check 4 it.”

Why is this a problem?

The original purpose of the rel=canonical tag is to help website owners eliminate self-created duplicate content. The canonical tag tells search engine spiders the original source of a file.

For example, a search engine robot might visit the web page “www.example.com/page4.htm”. If that page contains the tag
then search engines will show original page.com in the search results instead of example.com.

If hackers add the canonical tag to your web pages and point it to another website then your website content will help another website to get high rankings while your own website will lose all of its rankings.

How to check if your website is exploited

Open a page of your website in your browser and select “View HTML source” in your browser. If you can see a rel=canonical tag that points to an unknown domain in the head section of your page then your website has been hacked.

Unfortunately, hackers might have changed your web server so that it only shows the canonical tag to Google’s indexing robot. In that case, you have to check how Google sees your web pages:

1. Download and install iBusinessPromoter (IBP).
2. Select “Tools > Search engine spider simulator”
3. Select Google’s spider.
4. Check the HTML source in the spider simulator report for the canonical tag.

This works with the free demo version of iBusinessPromoter. You do not have to buy IBP to check your web pages with the spider simulator.

Google is aware of the problem. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find out if a webmaster intentionally inserted a canonical tag to a website or if the tag was inserted by a hacker. Further information about the canonical tag can be found in the news below.

Read original contents at Axandra.com.