Toyota has evolved from its roots as a traditional manufacturing company into a digitally savvy and forward-thinking brand. Transitioning from conventional print advertising, they’ve embraced social media marketing, which has increased brand awareness and customer acquisition. Here are three tactics you can learn from Toyota’s social media marketing strategies.

1. Produce Short Branded Videos

As part of their 2014 Tundra promotion, Toyota filmed 15-second Instagram videos and pushed through paid Facebook ads. The concept and execution of the videos were simple, allowing Toyota to reduce major advertising costs while engaging with their target audience.

They’ve continued to apply this concept to other vehicles, including the Rav4 and 4Runner. Toyota has generated thousands of likes on each video and a positive overall sentiment. Not too shabby for a short, cost-effective video.

Whichever platforms you choose, create short, branded videos to attract your target audience’s attention. Here are two major advantages to doing so:

• They’re economical. All you have to do is take out your smartphone, and you can produce a short video.
• They’re more effective considering consumers’ shrinking attention spans. According to Forbes, digital consumers are incredibly impatient and have an attention span of approximately eight seconds. You can adapt to this by delivering information in short videos.

2. Monitor Your Social Media

Social media monitoring refers to assessing conversations on social platforms to gather valuable customer data. Toyota has leveraged this marketing research approach to analyze conversations on Facebook and Twitter that contain keywords such as “Lexus,” “decide,” “buy,” and “BMW.” This assessment helps Toyota identify active shoppers who are comparing their products to those of their competitors and assess consumer sentiment towards the brand.

Toyota has also used social media monitoring for sales, service, quality, marketing, and product development. For example, they’ve used this approach to identify features that may have sparked consumer interest in a competitor’s product or issues a customer may have with a newly purchased car so that they can pass the information on to their engineers.

While you may not be able to staff a full-time social media monitoring team like Toyota, you can perform similar work with the help of an intern or part-time staff and a tool such as HootSuite, a social media dashboard.

For example, you could ask your team members to use HootSuite to track tweets that contain industry-specific keywords or monitor conversations that mention competitors’ names. To learn more about social media marketing, take a look at our article, The Basics for Promoting Your Business Through Social Media.

3. Use Pinterest To Improve Brand Appeal

Toyota invests in their Pinterest account to improve brand appeal. They often post photos of their shiny vehicles in luxury locations, at motor shows, or racing down the street. It positions the brand as stylish and practical.

You can also use this approach to help humanize your company, develop emotional appeals for your products, and make your brand seem approachable without looking too much like an advertisement.

To leverage Pinterest to enhance your brand appeal, take photos at community events (i.e. volunteer events or company outings), behind-the-scenes activities, or products in use. These images will help consumers see your brand’s fun and exciting side and deepen their connection to your company.

Conclusion

Toyota’s social media marketing strategy provides insights into large corporations’ social media programs that aim to increase competitiveness and business performance. While it’s difficult for smaller companies to emulate every strategy corporations like Toyota implement, it’s still beneficial to use some of their approaches to gather customer data or enhance brand appeal. These tactics will help improve your customer service and brand attractiveness to increase your chances of gaining sales.

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