Week 8B - Visual Examples

Visual Media works for the type of business that I am in because people are always looking for new information and content that relates to their vehicle(s). In addition, when people are looking to buy or sell their vehicle, the most up to date trends and pricing can be invaluable information that can make the transaction much easier. Many customers are also very keen on knowing about safety recalls as soon as they become available, so that they can be repaired faster and be back on the road safely.

 Unfortunately in my line of work there is not much competition on social media. However, I did see that CarFax is heavily active on social media. After checking their twitter account I found that they too are posting about recalls, but instead of posting specific recalls, they instead are going about it in a more generic fashion. For example, today they had a post with a picture of the state of New York saying that they are in the top 5 states in the country that have vehicles with outstanding unperformed factory recalls.

They post multiple times a day every day of the week and they have over 3,300 follower currently so it seems to be working quite well for them. However, after scrolling through a few days of their posts, it seems like their customer engagement is quite low. I did not see very many shares, likes or comments on their posts, which shows that even though they are active on social media, their customers do not appear to be interacting with them on that platform. Their last post was just about 5 hours ago and their ratio of posts to engagement is very low. I decided to follow CarFax for this assignment.

Week 8A - Visual Platforms

Visual Networks are absolutely right for my business. I post a lot of content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter currently and without the pictures I feel that the text alone is boring and gives no incentive for potential parties to click on the article or follow the link to the site. With a picture or even better with a video on the other hand, it is easy to see why the conversion rate goes up so drastically because there is something engaging to get the user to interact with the content.

When comparing the 8 different platforms outlined in the lecture and knowing that I already use three of them, there was a choice and some research necessary for me to make my final decision. In the end, I chose Pinterest. My decision was heavily influenced by the article that was required reading for this assignment entitled "5 Reasons to Use Pinterest for Business". I feel that since the rate of people who actually go from Pinterest on to actually purchase a product or service is so high, that it is the best option to start with.

I am hoping to add on a SnapChat Business account as well next, and hopefully a YouTube Business Account as well in the near future. However, for YouTube I want to take a video class first to make sure that my content is professional and well laid out for the end user so that the company does not come off looking bad. Here is the link to the Pinterest page I just setup for the business:

http://www.pinterest.com/cyclevin/

Week 7B - ScreenShot

I think that the posts that I scheduled on Facebook will engage my audience because they are relevant and up to date news articles that give the customer some insight into new things that are happening in the industry. New bike releases, new technology, laws and law enforcement related issues, as well as recalls and other technical information are all good categories that seem to interest my potential customer base.

Week 7A - Business Likes

This week I decided to like all of the major Motorcycle Manufacturers that I know of and sell a lot of history reports for. They include, Harley-Davidson, Indian, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Honda, Ducati and BMW.

The reason that I chose these businesses is because even though they only sell new vehicles, not used ones, and I do not sell new vehicle history reports, is because as soon as the new bikes are sold and ridden off the lot, they become used and I usually will have information available for them at that point.

I can potentially use this feature of Facebook to like and comment on other posts as my business instead of personally. I used to do this but a little while back Facebook changed the way you use Facebook as your business and I did not know how to continue until now.

Week 6B - Reach Vs. Engagement

The Difference between post reach and post engagement is that with post reach it is how any people are seeing your post on a give day or at a give time, while post engagement is how many people are actually commenting on, liking, reacting to, or otherwise responding to your posts.

Knowing the Difference between these two is so important because otherwise you can waste money on advertising. I learned the hard way last summer, I spent some money of Facebook and Instagram advertising, but because I was trying to target too wide of a base, I ended up getting lots of clicks but not a lot of sales as a result.

A business owner can use Facebook Insights in order to better serve their customers, by seeing the particular demographics and psychographics of their business's specific customer base. They can advertise specific products, services or content to their customers that they know will be attractive to them based upon the information provided by Facebook Insights.

Week 6A - Alternate Assignment

I started the Facebook Page for my business back in December of 2010. I really did not use it much until the last year or so when I added a blog to my site and started cross posting the blog articles on all my business social media accounts. Currently we have 305 followers and typically I post on the page about 5 times a week.

The first company I chose to check out is CarFax, they are making very good use of their page and even had a post as recent as 2 hours ago from writing this. They seem to post lots of questions with links to articles with the intent of getting potential customers to engage in a conversation. They are also using video which can be very appealing and draw a lot more attention that just using photos. They are posting multiple times every day and seem to be doing every day of the week. I think their cover photo should show a wrecked car and a fixed one, so that is one thing they could work on and that I may implement on my own page.

The second company I decided to check out is VINCheckPro, they are not making such good use of their page in my opinion. They do not post often, they post links without pictures or engaging text, and they only post about 2 times a month or so. Some of the posts are repeat posts which shows their lack of original content. Their page setup is nice with a good professional looking cover photo and their logo for their profile picture. There are many ways that they could improve their page, probably too many for me to list here, and from a potential customers standpoint that is a big turnoff with potential lost sales being a result.

I could only find two companies with Facebook pages that were active so unfortunately I was unable to do a third.