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LEXINGTON, Ky. — The social media buzz has been around for a while. Facebook recently announced it has reached half a billion users, and you still think that social media is a fad?

How could that possibly be since almost all dealerships have been practicing social media since the beginning of the automotive industry?

Now I will grant you that it was not digitized as it is today — more word of mouth then — and harnessing the power is now a little more tricky or techy. As an experienced social media evangelist I can tell you there are three stages that almost all dealerships go through when jumping into social media — experimentation, effective promoting and engagement.

—Experimentation is when you first start to discover social media platforms and begin signing up with as many as you can. You begin posting anything that happens in the dealership and some things you or your staff might want to publicize.

—Effective promoting is developing campaigns to generate more followers by giving away things like gift cards, free car washes, trees and even cash. This stage is usually necessary as a part of a social media strategy. Focusing only on generating new contacts misses the real opportunities to increase ROI.

—Engagement is the ultimate stage where you are actively listening to both your customers and potential prospects and providing useful and, in some cases, playful information to develop a relationship.

Obviously where you need to be is in the engagement stage as fast as you can, so what holds us back from jumping right into that stage?

For most in the automotive industry it seems to be a waste of money and an impossible media to track your ROI. For others it is the lack of knowledge and uneasiness to learn what is truly another language. Finally you decide to try it out, but do you do it in-house or hire an advertising agency or automotive industry social media professional, a tough choice that needs to be explored.

Using dealership staff in most cases happens when an employee in the store claims they understand what needs to be done and begins experimenting with various platforms and content without having defined a strategy or method to monitor your progress.

Hiring an experienced ad agency allows the dealership to jump into the effective promoting stage usually with a defined goal of adding people to follow their platform.

Engaging an automotive social media professional will move you right into the engagement stage and provides for the most cost effective way to listen and communicate on a one-to-one basis with both your customer base and potential prospects.

Now that is not to say that in all cases you won't get lucky and move quickly to realize the true potential of social media with your staff or the advertising agency. Every dollar spent must be accounted for and produce results today. Investments are nice, but taking the time to train your staff on developing a social media strategy or educating the outside ad agency that jumps into the automotive space should be done with caution.

Effective and efficient engagement with our customers and prospects is still the name of the game when it comes to selling and servicing automobiles. Time is money, and moving into the fast changing digitized area of social media requires resources. Whether you choose the slow route (experimenting), toll road (effective promoting) or superhighway (engagement) may make the difference between profit and loss.

Your comments and questions are welcomed. I'll be listening.

Ray Fenster is a business partner at Kain Automotive. He can be reached at (301) 922-8311 or at ray@kainautomotive.com.