In the last post, we took a look at the first part of putting together a social media marketing plan for your dealership. Hopefully you’ve taken some time to answer the question and identified your goal for the program.

Now let’s cover the other two pieces that are crucial for building a successful social media marketing program.

Who is going to manage it?

It’s an ongoing effort, not a quick hit. Bottom line: someone needs to be designated to run your dealership’s social media marketing program. It’s got to have content updates – photos, blog posts, status updates, tweets – on a regular basis to show that someones minding the store.

Here’s what I mean: search for auto dealers on Facebook, and you’ll find dozens of dealerships who created fan pages but haven’t done a thing with them. It’s not enough to have your store name, address and a picture of the building up there. Given the way that things have been going for the past few years, can the prospect be sure that a dealer they found online is still in business if they haven’t tweeted or had a status update in four months?

Even worse are inventory listings that haven’t been updated in more than a month — how can an online visitor be sure that what they want will still be available? They won’t even bother reaching out or coming by to find out.

These days, a social media program coordinator for your dealership doesn’t even have to be on staff. It’s easier and faster if they are, but remember what I said in the last post about all those social media marketing services? Here’s where they can help. There are so many people involved in this kind of marketing now that you could even find a freelancer to help you keep your content updates rolling.

How will you gauge your success?

Your answer here is directly related to your answer to question #1 from the last post, “What is your goal?”

If you’re looking for lead generation, you’re going to be watching metrics like inventory sold and revenue generated for your dealership from prospects who found you through social media. It can be a challenge to track where these prospects come from, but it can still be done once you have a process in place to capture the information.

Measurement for the other two choices – engagement and monitoring – is a lot fuzzier and still hotly debated in social media marketing circles.  Is it your numbers of fans or followers? What about the frequency of your tweets or your online conversations? How can you tell if you’re being successful?

It’s up to you to decide how you’re going to measure the return on your efforts — but it is a critical element for completing your plan. Without it, you won’t be able to tell if the time you’ve put into building out your social media marketing program is getting you what you want.

Good news – it’s not too late.

It doesn’t have to be written in stone, and it doesn’t even have to be in place before you get started. But without a social media marketing plan, you’ll be driving without a map.

Without one, how will you know if you get lost?