News for the Week of 2.18 

New Twitter Timeline Feature

Twitter users and marketers will be happy to see the latest update, which allows them to view the best Tweets first.  Most Twitter users follow hundreds, if not thousands of people, and this enhancement…

If you are active on Twitter, you might have already noticed the addition of a tiny lightning bolt icon up in the menu bar where you can find your mentions or direct messages. Last week, Twitter launched Moments, a new feature that makes it easier for users to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the world.

Basically, Moments makes it so that you…

Social media kicked off the New Year with some interesting updates geared toward increasing content exposure and diversifying communications tools. While some automotive professionals have expressed thatsocial isn’t selling cars, these updates may yet give us hope!

So far, here are 2015’s five social media updates your dealership…

It’s no secret that the FTC has been monitoring brand usage of social media. The hammer finally fell when the FTC ruled last week that companies and agencies utilizing social media must include disclaimers. This is regardless of the social media platform and whether or not the account is a brand account, an agency account, or company employee’s personal account – and yes,…

The most amazing part about the internet and social media is that it has opened up communication between people and businesses that was never possible before. We now have the ability to talk to our customers and for them to talk to us in an interactive fashion, allowing for clear lines of engagement that can be both public and private.

For car dealers, this…

Savvy dealers are turning to low cost alternatives like Facebook and Twitter and other social media outlets as their alternative. Not only is it free, but it can help you interact with your future and existing customers in real-time. It's no secret that Dealers will do just about anything to gain new customers by any means necessary. Radio, Print and TV ads…

I get it. I understand the need for more content to serve to an ever-growing flow of content consumers. The art of recycling content is important, particularly on sites like Twitter where a piece of content can and should be used multiple times in order to get the message out to everyone. It's a chronological feed, after all, and posting it once will only get it seen…

 STOP UGLY TWEETING SOCIAL MEDIA GURUS, GOOGLE DOESN'T LIKE IT

Google views the overuse of #Hashtags much like spam, and excludes those tweets from their real time search results. So,…

If you're reading this, you're probably failing at social media image marketing. That's not me being cynical. By examining dozens of business social media presences every week, I get to see what so many are doing and the unfortunate fact is that 9 out of 10 are doing it wrong or not doing it at all. I'm being conservative with that estimate.

The "unfortunate"…

Let's state this for the record. I am not convinced that using the new image features on Twitter is the best way to go when it comes to marketing your business. It still smells too much like spam and if it's not handled properly it could do more harm than good.

With that said, there are definitely instances when it could do VERY well,…

We are seeing the "Facebookification" of Twitter happening before our eyes. No longer will we see a nice, minimized feed of Tweets presented to us on our smartphones or computers with several Tweets lining top to bottom on the screen. We'll see pictures, ads, and videos taking up more space by themselves than three Tweets presented the old…

When you want to get some pretty good data on using social media for marketing, one of the best people to turn to is Dan Zarrella, Hubspot's social media scientist. "Mad scientist" may be a better phrase for him, but he's crazy like a fox when it comes to…

There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.…

I was consulting with a potential client yesterday and started looking at their Facebook and Twitter pages. Once a day, every day, they would post a question that had very little to do with anything at all. "What was the last movie you watched?"

Once a day, every day, they wouldn't get a response from anyone. It was awkward…

When I was asked last year to develop a social media marketing service, the first question they asked was whether I already had software in mind or if it needed to be built. I told them that the software had already been developed and it was free. This didn’t go over well at first; they’d always used premium social media…

During a discussion with a potential client, something came up that surprised me. It shouldn’t have considering the types of information that are floating around the internet and being spread by “gurus,” but it did.

“I post pictures to Facebook and links to Twitter,” she told me.

That was the sum of their strategy. In a way it sort of made sense – rather, I…

You could actually communicate on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter if you just had an app that creates images with HUGE text. Well, now, you can.-- …

Stop the madness! I, unfortunately, might be part of the cause of the recent trends happening on dealer Twitter profiles and for that, I am truly sorry.

For years, I've been harping on the concept that Twitter is something that no dealer should avoid because of how quick and easy it is. There's no huge investment of time required to have a strong Twitter presence. This advice and the…