By now, your auto shop should be using social media. Social media accounts have turned from a place to write funny comments on your friend’s pictures to somewhere people share ideas and their experiences with their online friends. If social media users are giving your shop positive reviews online, you want to make sure their friends and followers can find your business’s page to check it out for themselves. However, it’s not enough just to have a Facebook page anymore. It has to stay updated, upbeat, and fun. In order to help you obtain an impressive social media presence, we decided to give you a series of blog posts with all the tips and advice your automotive shop needs to succeed.

First up: popular and free accounts you should be using, and why.

1. 1. Facebook – If it doesn’t already, your auto shop absolutely needs a Facebook fan-page where customers can rave about your practice, and potential customers can read about how great you are. The more people visit your Facebook page, the more your list of potential customers grows. With 1.44 billion people using Facebook, you can’t afford to miss out on this awesome tool.
2. 2. Twitter – While Facebook is great for liking, tagging, commenting, and sharing, Twitter is better used for informing your followers. There are 236 million active users on Twitter, so if you aren’t using it, it’s an untapped resource for growing your customer base. There are groups you can join and hashtags you can make to help get your name out there. Twitter is also an important tool to stay up to date yourself. If you follow the right accounts, you can keep up with breaking news in the auto industry. Doing this could potentially give you an advantage over any shop that isn’t aware of something like recent technology/news.
3. 3. LinkedIn – Facebook and Twitter are all about fun and games, LinkedIn shows that you mean business. If you’re short on time, LinkedIn is very flexible with how much you should be involved. Potential customers check LinkedIn to see your reputation, check your reliability, and compare your shop against competitors. This is an important tool to separate you from your competition, because satisfied customers can easily endorse or recommend you through the website, increasing your credibility.
4. 4. Google+ – We know what you are thinking – what is Google plus? This social media channel may not be as popular, but it is important because it belongs to Google and they love when you use it. Opening a Google+ page can improve your shop’s local visibility on search results, especially if you have a small or medium-sized auto shop. Content you put on your Google+ page can rank in Google’s search results in situations where your website may not. This is a very important tool for your SEO, which is ultimately determined by Google.

Of course, having all of these accounts and keeping them up to date can be time consuming and in some cases tedious. There are all-in-one social media management systems like Hootsuite, where you can simultaneously post to all four of these accounts at once. If you don’t already have all four of these accounts, talk to one of our experts to help you set one up!