Royal Ford builds a social media hub for its community
If you can’t figure out all the ins and outs of social media yourself – just recruit someone younger to show you the way.
Royal Ford dealer principal Terry Ortynsky, from Yorkton, Sask. did just that when he turned the reins over to daughter Stephanie during a summer work term.
“Social media was an unknown territory for us at the beginning,” says Stephanie Ortynsky. “I think that’s why my dad enlisted my help because I’m only 23, so I have a better idea about how to use this new platform.”
Stephanie set up Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages and started to generate a following. “Being a small-town dealership we sponsor a lot of events. We give a new Mustang away every year to the school,” says Ortynsky. “Social media became a tool to showcase what we were doing in the community. It was just another marketing channel, in addition to the newspaper and radio ads that we were already doing.”
This grass-roots approach seems to be working well and is a lesson other dealers can learn from. Using social media tools to provide benefits to your community, and becoming a hub for conversation generates exactly the kind of long-term benefits dealers are after. Once you establish yourself as a trusted member of your community the sales will come.
For Stephanie, she recognized that social media and sales don’t always mix well. “We knew going into it that we didn’t want to use it as a selling platform because I think we would have been rejected if we’d tried to do that.”
But Royal Ford wasn’t satisfied with their first social media steps. Soon thereafter, the dealership pushed its social media outreach to another level by working with a third-party provider to build an entire social media community featuring news, video, events, blogs and more – and not just their dealership. You can check it out for yourself at: www.yorktoncommunity.org/.
A step ahead
Barb Khadiken, the dealership’s general operations manager, says that Terry Ortynsky is always a step ahead when it comes to implementing new ideas. “The one thing with Terry, he doesn’t look from the inside out at his dealership. He takes a step back and looks at the big picture. He looks at long-term relationships,” says Khadiken. “We are always on the leading edge. A lot of people tend to follow in our footsteps.”
You can see this long-term investment in relationship building at work on the Yorkton social media site. Jessica Fielding is the SOMAR, or Social Media Account Representative, who works with the Royal Ford team on their social media community site.
“We build a community that is just for the car dealers,” says Fielding, who works for ADP Dealer Services. ADP’s software tools power the Royal Ford social media community. “For Yorkton, we wanted to get the local community involved because it is a tight-knit area. We opened the site up to local events, such as hockey games.”
Fielding explains that APD usually has a main point of contact at the dealership to coordinate photos and get scoops on community events, but the ADP staff write the stories, post photos and videos and keep the site fresh and updated. Working with a third-party allows the dealership to maintain an active social media presence, without having to have full-time staff devoted to the task. It’s a win-win for both parties.
When Stephanie was headed back to school after the summer, the dealership was looking at hiring someone to keep the social media push going. “They were thinking about someone who was in their mid-40s and I discouraged that,” says Ortynsky.
Smart kid. Someone should hire her to run a social media strategy for their dealership.
