The 20-20-60 Rule

People are too intent on gaining as many followers/friends as possible as if it were a sign of popularity, it isn’t. The 20-20-60 Rule, if followed, will create a high number of friends that will want to do business with you. The numbers in the 20-20-60 Rule is the percentage of your time that should be spend on the 3 areas of social engagement.

Relationships First

Never pitch yourself, your business or your product before you have the right to do so. If you haven’t built the kind of relationships that promotes mutual trust and respect then you haven’t earned the right to promote.

Traditional advertising is a one way pitch that takes being social out of the equation. If you are a business and want the most out of your social media efforts, build relationships and earn the right to tell people about your product, you will reap the benefits.

I hear it all the time, “social media doesn’t work for me.” After looking at their social networks and how they are interacting I almost always see nothing but self promotion. People do not care about what you have to sell unless they care about you as a person. That’s the way it is with social media, give people a reason to want to do  business with you, build a relationship based on trust and mutual respect and you will start to see your market share sky rocket.

Relationship Building On The WWW

If social networks are the communities of cyber space, relationships are the currency on which they were built. Building positive win-win relationships with your customers is the single most important aspect of social media marketing. If you want to stay consistent or even grow during market recessions then you must have the kind of relationship with customers that makes them feel comfortable buying from you.

Building relationships goes beyond the person or the people you are interacting with. If done correctly these people will want to tell others about you, they will be your ambassadors and will gladly sing your praises. I have devised a rule, that if followed, will generate massive amounts of followers and friends on your social networks. Even more important than the sheer number of your friends is the quality of the people in your network. By quality I mean people that like, know and trust you. It’s one thing to have 3000 local people as friends on your Facebook page but another one entirely to say that you have 3000 friends that know who you are.

Conversations

People are on social networks to interact with other people so interact! There are many different ways to start conversations both online and off but the best way is by asking thought provoking questions.

There are lots of ways to start conversations, both online and off. For starters you can ask open ended questions such as, “I just sat down to eat at the Texas Roadhouse, should I get the ribs or the steak?”

Here are a few more:

• What’s your favorite Dr. Seuss book?
• Have you ever been in a food fight?
• What famous person do people say you look the most like?
• Would you lie in court, under oath to protect your best friend? What about your spouse?
• Butter or margarine?
• What is your favorite Christmas song?

The sillier the better in most cases and of course there are tens of thousands more, what can you come up with?

1. ________________________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________________________
4. ________________________________________________________________
5. ________________________________________________________________

The idea here is to start a conversation and interact with as many people as possible. If you ask the right questions and the right people respond you could possibly be interacting with hundreds if not thousands of people at a time, in fact that’s how trending topics begin on twitter (more on trending topics later).

Bottom line is: Interact!

The first 20 is all about passing along good information. We are in a time when the news comes to us, no longer do we have to wait for the evening news or the morning paper to find out what is going on in the world around us. It use to be that yesterday’s news was old news, now the same thing could be said about last hours.

If you can be known as the person that shares valuable and interesting information you go a long way to positioning yourself as the authority. Below you will find a few sites that you can go to find good stuff to share.

• Alltop.com: A website that aggregates all the top stories from across the web. These stories are broken down by category and can be searched by interest. These stories are from the most popular blogs from across the internet.
• YouTube.com: We all know what YouTube is and there is nothing quite as viral as a good video.
• PopUrls.com: Much like Alltop.com PupUrls.com is an aggregate for the top stories from across the web. Where it differs is that PopUrls.com isn’t limited just to blogs.
• Google.com/Alerts: If you would like breaking news as it happens you can sign up for Google to alert you by email on stories that relate to a keyword of your choosing.
• Digg.com: Digg.com is another news aggregate but with a twist, it can be voted on by its user, it can be voted on by you. Digg.com is a great place to find “pretested content.”
• Reddit.com: Reddit is full of great information and is a lot like Digg only nigger AND better in my opinion. There are hundreds of subreddits where you can find just about anything you want.

While there are many more you can use you will find more than enough content to share from these six sites. Each of these sites can be searched for specific content. For instance you can find information on Ford if you’re a Ford dealer, on Toyotas if you’re a Toyota dealer, even info on aftermarket accessories.

Don’t stick just to vehicles though, talk about other stuff as well such as current events and last night’s episode of Dancing With The Stars. Don’t forget local, talk about local news and events that are going on in your town. It showcases that you are part of what’s going on instead of being an outsider looking in. People like familiarity and if you mention a local restaurant that they frequent you have given then one more reason to like you.

Funny is money. If you can make people laugh with the things you share then you are way ahead of the game. Laughter shows that you are real, not some sort of stuffy salesperson, business owner or manager. If you were to take a look at the top viral videos on the internet you will see that will all make you laugh.

Note On Images And Links: When posting an image or a link on sites such as Facebook and Google + make sure that you add some sort of caption or an engaging question to get people to comment. For instance, just the other day, I put up a picture of a road sign called Street Rd, the caption, on Facebook, read: “Whoever named this street…errr road, must have been a creative genius and by creative genius I mean lacking any creativity at all. What are some weird road names that you’ve seen?” The picture received over 90 comments, fun was had by all!

The second 20 in the 20-20-60 rule is all about you! You use these posts, tweets, status updates, blog posts and other points of contact to talk about yourself and your dealership. You can point people to your blog, to your site, to videos and talk about specials you have on cars or upcoming events at the dealership.

Be careful not to put all of your self-promotional pieces up all at once, people will zero in on these updates and in their minds will see you only as a self promoter.

Not too long Google announced real time search results. What that means is that if somebody is performing a search on a “Used Ford Fusion in Columbus OH” they would see, in real time, what people are saying about used Ford Fusions in Columbus OH. This box will be updated real time, that means no more static search pages!

This has huge implications on search engine rankings and will allow dealerships to showcase their inventory and have it indexed on the front page of Google almost instantly. Bing has also announced real time searches, in fact they have even beat Google to the punch. Remember that even though you will be tempted to throw all of your inventory on your social networks, keep in mind the 20-20-60 rule. Unless of course you created a separate account just for real time search… just a thought.

60 percent of everything you do on social networks should be all about building relationships. I want you to join in as many conversation as you can, repost what others are saying and interact with your “friends” as much as possible.

Give good tips, offer advice and help out people in need. Comment on videos, repost status updates and start conversations. Do all the things you do in real life, be a friend.

If you see that somebody is having a bad day cheer them up. If somebody has a question answer it, even if it’s a link to a websites or a video send something. Read what your friends are posting about and react to it. If you have a friend on Facebook that enjoys cycling then find an article on cycling and send it to them. This does two things: it shows that you are paying  attention to them and that you care enough to send something that interests them.

I’m not saying that you should do this for everybody in your network, there isn’t enough time in the day for that but if you do it for one odds are in your favor that they will mention it to somebody else. Taking the cyclist example one step further it wouldn’t be too farfetched that an avid cyclist would have friends that are also cyclists. If the article was well received they would then forward it to their cyclist friends and give you credit for it. Again, this is word of mouth advertising gone wild and another way to promote yourself.

ACTION STEP: Go back through this training module and fill in all the blanks and answer all the questions, yes even the examples I gave you to post on your social networks. I want you to pay particular attention to how answering this questions made you feel, then imagine what would happen if somebody disagreed with you and the kind of conversation that would result because of it.

Next I want you to visit all the sites I pointed out to you, familiarize yourself with them.