Duane,

What applies to our shop may not apply to GR shops because we are a transmission specialty repair shop that does transmission and drivetrain-only related work.

Social media, in it's broadest sense doesn't seem to work for us in any way we can measure realistically. "Likes" are meaningless to us. What we want is a phone call.

With that being said, we use tracking numbers extensively to see what works, and more importantly, what doesn't work. A "conversion" to us is a phone call. Because we have so many tracking numbers, when somebody calls us, we know exactly how they got our number. We have a special tracking number for our Facebook page and that's how we know it doesn't get enough traction to be worth the effort.

The only social media that pays off for us is YouTube. We currently have over 2K videos on our 4 YouTube channels, most of which are customer's transmissions Show-N-Tells. The others are customer reviews, customers watching their transmission being rebuilt, etc. We receive lots of calls off of our YouTube tracking number.

As a side note, we have keyword level call tracking on our website. We are engaged in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and have found that to be VERY cost effective. We get the most calls off of the keyword "transmission repair" at about $13/click average for all keywords.

We're about a $700K/yr. shop. Admittedly, it's expensive; we spend about $60K/yr. with Google. However, with PPC advertising, it has raised our annual revenue to $1.3M. I wish I could say the same about Facebook.

Larry Bloodworth
Technical Information Specialist/Technician
Tanner Transmissions
Draper, Utah, USA