Automotive Advertising Through Social Media --- Jordan Glover

Automotive Advertising Through Social Media by: Jordan Glover

By watching TV commercials, you can see that the most recent trend in advertising for companies is through the most popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Companies are using these methods because they have been shown to be extremely effective in promoting business.

Hewlett Packard published a recent study in 2010 named Predicting the Future With Social Media. The study shows that by recording the numbers of Tweets about a particular movie, they can accurately forecast the amount of money they will make at the box office on the opening weekend. It is a simple yet valuable model. It is not surprising that they have chosen to use Twitter as their focus because of its rising interest.

The 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them is a story published on Mashable.com that shows that 10 percent of the top brands are automotive manufacturers. It is interesting on the other hand how they use their social media sites. The companies mentioned are Ford, General Motors, Chevrolet and Honda. Scott Monty, the official account tweeter for Ford, said that Ford tweets because “It’s part of a larger social media strategy to humanize the Ford brand and put consumers in touch with Ford employees” whereas General Motors said that social media was an “Experiment at first, but now for feedback, to clarify misconceptions, hear from and talk to customers/observers who may not comment on our blogs”. In a way, this social media advertising is not actually advertisement in the traditional sense where they try to sort of trick you into buying their products by making them look sometimes better than they actually are or using persuasive techniques that trigger an emotional response or through celebrity sponsorship.

They are trying to get in touch with their intended buyers, to get feedback and comments on new cars. It is also interesting in the fact that they can defend themselves against bad publicity or fallacy that they get from the news, you can see their words directly, not the skewed or biased point of view that the news often shows.

One of the most important parts of advertising is comments and feedback. Social Media has become a part of everyday life because it is now so easily accessible. Everyone is connected to the Internet and almost everyone now has a Smartphone, which can connect to social media over the cell phone network allowing you to do anything that you could with your home computer. When people see something that they like they often talk about it on their favorite social media by sharing links and telling other people about it. The more people that find and like the advertisement whether it is out in the open or disguised as something else the more positive feedback the company gets which allows them to react to the feedback by giving the people more of what they want.

People like it when they can become a part of something like the Focus Rally America because it allows them to feel closer to it, when they can comment and follow so closely. Talking to the teams and helping them figure out clues to the rally it makes them feel closer to the action and that their opinion really matters and then they end up caring what happens and who wins. They do not just watch a few episodes and get bored and stop watching. Today’s fast paced society requires this because people lose interest quickly if they cannot some how get involved.

This new approach makes people feel more like friends to the people behind the industry, not just buyers of a product. It shows the people how much the sellers care. This new approach seems to be productive considering that pretty much all of the companies have their own social media empires combining many of the different sites including, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.