Facebook Best Professional Service – What It Means To You

Facebook, being the largest social media network (with about 1.5 Billion active users) has always tried to close the gap between their users and other sites. The more they can roll into facebook the more time their users will spend on facebook. This is why it was no surprise when facebook took a giant leap in the reviews world by launching their new Best Professional Service site.

People now have the ability to effortlessly search facebook for local businesses with the best reviews. Which is great news for dealerships with good reviews, but bad news for everyone else. Those dealerships with lots of good reviews will be shown, acquire more business, and in-turn get more positive reviews from that new business and have an even stronger place at the front of the pack. While dealers with poor reviews or no reviews will find it hard to displace those top rated dealerships.

But don’t fret yet…

You can still get to that top spots, you need to start getting good Facebook reviews and soon. There are a few ways I have seen dealers go about doing this.

1. Offer a spiff to the sales people – If a salespersons name shows up in a review they get $50, or $100 or whatever you decide. This ensures that they try to give good customers service to your current customers but also means they are helping to obtain new customers via positive online reviews, which as we all know people read like crazy when researching their next car. You can also go the other route of saying “You need to get more positive reviews, this is part of your job now” and not give any spiff. Whatever works for your dealership.
2. Make it part of your closing process – Get some cards printed up with a small blurb about how important customer service is to you and how important feedback is to you and ask that they review your dealership. Include the URLs to your various review sites (Facebook, Yelp, Google) and include that card in the packet you give them with all their papers. If you send out a follow up/thank you email – even better, include links to your review sites.
3. Focus on the review sites that matter – This one isn’t facebook specific but still important. Before working in the automotive industry I had never heard of DealerRater, I don’t know one person outside the industry that knows what DealerRater is, you need to get reviews on sites where people organically go, you may be paying for DealerRater and getting reviews, but that has more to do with you asking customer to leave reviews there so they do, but if no one is reading them, it does nothing for you. Get your reviews in front of eyeballs, this means Facebook, Google, Yelp.
4. Make sure your facebook profile is up to date – Review your address and contact info, logo and cover image, short and long business description.
5. Keep on it – Reviews need to be part of your business, you may read this and decide it is important and get on the sales people for a month or two about reviews but many times after that, reviews will be put on the back burner. Reviews are part of being in business now. It is part of the buying cycle, and it is an important tool to bring in new business.

Facebook’s Best Professional Service site is still new and will take some time to be widely used, but let’s hope by the time it is, your dealership is at the top of the list with a good rating and you can see all those new customer drive off your lot with a new car instead of the competitions.