Tips for Your Car Wash Social Media Accounts
It’s common knowledge that to be successful in today’s marketplace, almost every business needs to have an online presence – and it pretty much goes without saying that an online presence means a social presence.
According to Neal Schaffer, customers who have enjoyed positive social media interactions with brands recommend the brand to social contacts at a rate of 71%. So, while it might take a while to build a loyal following across the many different platforms at your disposal, the reward can be well worth it.
To help you get started, we’ve put together a list of social media tips for your car wash business’ social media marketing.
- Start with a Strategy
Running social channels can be one person’s entire job, so if you have any notions about this being an easy task that you can tackle on the fly, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.
To start, you’ll want to have a formal, written strategy that covers things like messaging, posting schedules, and more. There are plenty of articles online offering opinions on what works, what doesn’t, and what the so-called “best practices” are for social media marketing.
We recommend tuning these out and doing your own research.
What platforms will serve your customers best? How often do they want to be reached? You likely know the answers to these questions better than any third party source, so go with your gut. The most important thing is that you continue to update your strategy whenever you gain a new insight.
- Develop a Distinct Voice
As with all marketing tactics, the goal with social media marketing is to be noticed – and the best way to get noticed is to do something different. Once you start to grow an online following, it’s important to make sure that your voice is entirely your own. Ideally, your followers should be able to tell that a post is yours without seeing your profile picture.
This voice goes beyond messaging, and should impact the type of images and videos you share, who you follow, and more. Once again, the strategy behind this should be formally laid out in a document that is easily accessible to all members of your organization, current and future.
Having a set of guidelines can help answer questions about when to brand an image, what filters to use, when to tag accounts in our captions, the list goes on.
- Use Hashtags
It’s likely that a majority of your potential customers follow some sort of hashtags related to your area or your service industry. For instance, auto-related tags could expose you to hobbyists. Tags like #colorado #denver or #dtc could give you access to those around you, from state-wide down to individual neighborhoods.
Hashtags also encourage participation. Imagine a satisfied customer posting a photo of their car after a fresh wash. Encouraging them to tag your business and use a hashtag is an easy way to boost your social media cred and grow your following.
- Get Competitive
Competitions are a great tactic for social media because they don’t just encourage engagement, they require it. Mandating that users tag your account in a post, follow your page, or otherwise engage in order to enter a contest can both energize your social network and boost your numbers organically.
The kind of interaction that is required for successful social media contests exposes your messaging to each participant’s own followers and network, meaning you can reach more people than you would otherwise be able to. Let’s say you need people to follow your page to enter. Even after the contest ends, they’ll still be exposed to your messaging.
- Take Advantage of Customer Testimonials
Gathering and managing positive ratings and reviews from customers boosts your search engine rankings and adds legitimacy to your brand. Prospective customers are more likely to feel like they can trust you.
Think about it. A nasty Yelp review can easily turn you off from trying that new restaurant that just opened down the street. The same is true for any business in the service industry. Customers do their research before trying something new. You want to make sure that this research paints you in a good light.
Explore more tips and strategies related to the car wash industry with Hover Architecture, where we make it our business to share our industry knowledge with car wash owners and developers like you. Check out our blog to explore more of our recent content today.