A monthly social calendar your team will actually keep up with

Most dealership social calendars die in week three. Somebody builds a beautiful spreadsheet with thirty unique post ideas, that person goes on vacation, and the account falls silent until someone posts a stock photograph of a truck in a canyon that is not in your inventory or your province.

The fix is not more ideas. It is fewer ideas, repeated.

Twelve formats, on rotation

Pick twelve, run them on rotation, and stop trying to be original every day. Nobody follows a car dealership for novelty.

1. Delivery photo — customer, car, keys, first names, one line about what they were looking for.
2. Technician at work — thirty seconds of an actual repair, explained in plain language.
3. New arrival walkaround — vertical, sixty seconds, on the lot, unscripted.
4. Staff introduction — who they are, how long they have been here, the first car they owned.
5. The honest answer — one question you get every week, answered without a pitch attached.
6. Behind the scenes — the detail bay, the lot at seven in the morning, a transport truck unloading.
7. Local — the team you sponsor, a community event, road conditions after a storm.
8. Then and now — a trade-in beside the vehicle that replaced it.
9. A seasonal service tip that saves somebody money.
10. Something you got wrong and then fixed.
11. A vehicle you would not recommend for a particular use, and why.
12. A milestone — an anniversary, a hundredth review, somebody’s twentieth year.

Two a week from that list is a full year of content, and you never open a blank calendar again.

Shot where the cars are

Everything is filmed on a phone by whoever is already standing there. Not a videographer, not a quarterly production day that generates six months of footage nobody uses.

• Vertical, always.
• Natural light, so mornings and late afternoon.
• Captions burned in — most of it is watched with the sound off.
• Real names and real faces.

Stock photography is the fastest way to look like every other store, in a business where the only things you have that they do not are where you are and who works there.

Who owns it

One person, fifteen minutes a day, named in writing. Usually somebody in service, or a younger salesperson who is on their phone anyway.

Pay them for it, or give them the time back. The most common failure is not that nobody at the store can do it — it is that it was added to somebody’s existing job as a favour, and favours end.

What to measure

Not followers. Saves, shares and direct messages. A post that generates four DMs from people in your county is worth more than one that generates four hundred views from people who will never drive here.