Twitter for Car Dealers: Don’t Connect to Facebook!

Does your dealership share Facebook posts on Twitter?

Infinite Prospects advises why car dealerships should not post their Facebook posts directly to Twitter. Very simply, it makes them look lazy.

By Adam Ross, Managing Director at Infinite Prospects

As a social media consultant for Car Dealerships, I follow hundreds of car dealers on Twitter, to see how they use the social network to connect and interact with potential car shoppers in their area. I have noticed a growing trend in the automotive world among some dealerships: tweets that come directly from Facebook. How do I know this? Because those tweets include the URL shortener “fb.me.” That’s the URL shortener that Facebook uses on Twitter to keep its links short. This can happen when a dealership (or a person) connects their Facebook account to their Twitter account.

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In an informal survey I took on my personal Facebook page, digitally savvy automotive professionals indicated that they would be less inclined to click on a link that began with fb.me over just about any other link shortener. I personally feel the same way - I would not click on a fb.me link unless the description was VERY compelling. Every person asked said it absolutely mattered to them what the URL shortener was, and not one person said they would be MORE inclined to click on a link on Twitter that came from Facebook.

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What NOT to do: Connect Facebook to Twitter

If people are less inclined to click on a fb.me shortened link, why would you post to Twitter directly from Facebook, unless it’s out of laziness? They are two different networks with different audiences and people communicate differently on each of them. Twitter can be tricky. There’s an etiquette to it. Very simply: DON’T CONNECT FACEBOOK TO TWITTER!

Take that Facebook post or link and copy it to your clipboard, then paste it directly into Bit.ly, Hootsuite or Buffer to be published to Twitter. Alternatively, you can just paste it into a tweet directly on Twitter. You will get more out of your post by doing it either of those ways.

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