Just 3 percent of 4,005 new and used car buyers polled last summer said social media influenced their purchase decision, according to a survey by market researcher R.L. Polk & Co. and AutoTrader.com, a car shopping Web site.
"It's amazing that we put so much priority on social media when it's not making us a lot of money," said Kevin Frye, eCommerce director for the nine-store Jeff Wyler Automotive Family in Cincinnati.
Frye said he has experimented for four years with social media -- with little success turning that engagement into sales. He's sticking with it, but he's doubtful that direct vehicle sales will result.
Dealers across the country are racking their brains to understand what social media can do and how much money they should spend on it.
Many dealers say that social media are good for building relationships and awareness. Many add that that social media's role in auto sales is bound to grow, so dealers need to jump in. On the social sites, dealers can post videos, pictures, blogs, answer questions and converse with customers on various topics.
And there are modest success stories: For A.J. Maida, director of digital marketing for Papa's Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in New Britain, Conn., the returns on his time and money on social media have been good.
Maida said the dealership has been selling up to five vehicles per month from social media contacts since a year ago, when the store started posting more content on Facebook and other sites and monitoring those sites closely.
But five per month is still only 3 percent of his annual sales. Papa's, in the Hartford area since 1947, sold about 2,000 new and used vehicles in 2010, Maida said.
Depressingly small'
Evidence that few buyers are influenced by social media is buttressed by another study. Dataium, which monitors auto-shopping habits online, tracked 1.5 million auto shoppers by watching the Web sites that they visited. Of those shoppers, just 9,400 linked to a dealer Web site directly from a social media site.
Just six of those 9,400 shoppers sent a message to the dealer asking for a follow-up, said Jason Ezell, president and co-founder of Dataium.
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