I hope dealerships realize that a social media presence is necessary these days. Hopefully, there is someone at your dealership handling this. More likely than not, this task has been assigned to someone which this is NOT their primary responsibility.

That being said, is there a thing as being “too social”?

There are many social networks out there and new ones popping up everyday. In a perfect world, dealers would have a dedicated person that could keep up with and manage them all by posting new content (preferably original) via blogs and all the social networks with their listening ears on. Most dealers, however, don’t have the budget for this type of person. It’s hard enough for ME to keep up with them all much less to ask a dealer to.

Would it be better if a dealer picked a few and concentrated on being really good at those instead of spreading themselves so thin that they aren’t managing or maintaining an active presence on them all? It’s not enough just to have a Facebook page or G+ page or Twitter account, you have to engage and keep fresh content on it.. nurture it.

Right now we have Facebook, Twitter, G+, Google Places, LinkedIn, YouTube, … and the list goes on. Now Microsoft is about to enter the game with Microsoft Socl.. yet another social network to maintain. Right now, there are 205 websites listed on Wikipedia as “social networking sites” (Yes, I counted them). You can’t effectively manage all of them (and most of them wouldn’t apply either) but you do still have to figure in managing your online reputation through sites like Yelp, DealerRater, etc as well as the location-based services out there like Foursquare.. Oh, and don’t forget about blogging!

It’s exhausting to think about, isn’t it? I promise it’s just as exhausting to actually do.

My advice: If you don’t have (or can’t afford, or don’t want to afford) a person that can actually manage this full-time, pick a few sites mixing up social, reputation management, location-based and a blog… and be good at them.