Some comments based on what I have seen:
- actively pursuing Facebook ‘Likes’ is not worth the effort for general auto repair shops. For the time required to do it well there are more productive forms of marketing you can spend your time on.
- general repair shops can use Facebook to maintain current customer relationships. It is not so good for attracting new customers. The effort to get to point where you have enough “friends” to make new contacts often does not justify the effort to build that network.
- Facebook can work very well for specialty shops that can develop a ‘community’ of enthusiastic followers. Performance shops are a good example. Photos, videos, and sport news give you lots of content that people are actually interested in. So difficult to come up with content that general vehicle owners are sincerely interested in… they just don’t care.