Why don’t dealers twitter?

Research published in Motor Trader recently claimed that only one in ten of car dealers used any form of social networking to promote their company, compared to 49% of all other businesses.

What makes dealers so slow to twitter?

Could it be that car dealers are so focused on their products that they find little time to actually talk to their customers?

It is understandable that anyone working in a car dealership likes cars. The cars are beautiful and they are great to drive, and most dealer staff must love showing off all the wonderful new features. But dealers must realise that they could be in a minority. Most people out there driving these wonderful pieces of new technology are not necessarily as fixated on the product as the dealer is.

What Twitter and the other social networks make organisations do is see things from the customer’s point of view. Dealers will have to think up reasons for communicating with customers, welcoming them into their former ‘gentlemen’s club’, and make everyone feel at home, not just the petrol head.

Whereas most car dealers, deep down, probably believe that the products themselves are so irresistible, that customers should be beating a path to their forecourt and wait patiently while staff decide whether or not to allow them the honour of a test drive.

Every business today is about people, especially retail. You have to love your product, but you have to like people too. There are lots of social trend factors and economic factors you could use to argue the case for social networking, but in the end, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are just an expression of how people-orientated your business is, rather than product orientated.

28/2/10

Tags: TWITTER