Case Study · Rush Enterprises
Fifty dealership pages. One inventory engine. Link clicks up 9,047%.
Rush Enterprises is North America’s largest commercial vehicle dealer group, and in 2019 its social presence looked like what it was: dozens of dealerships posting on their own, each with different inventory and a different idea of what a Facebook page is for. We built one system underneath all of them. Eighteen months later the numbers read like a different company: 29.7 million impressions, 1.34 million engagements, and 496,686 clicks through to inventory, up 9,047% over the prior period.
29.7M
Impressions across the network (+1,899%)
496,686
Post link clicks to inventory (+9,047%)
1.34M
Engagements · 4.5% ER held at scale (+1,682%)
CLIENT
Rush Enterprises, Inc.
Industry
Commercial Trucks · Dealer Network
Engagement
HQ + 50-plus dealerships · Aug 2019 – Feb 2021
Offering this proves
Multi-Location / Full-Service Social
01
THE STUCK POINT
The biggest dealer network in North America was posting like fifty small businesses.
Rush sells trucks. Every kind you can think of, flatbeds to 18-wheelers, plus school buses through Rush Bus Centers and wrecker bodies through Rush Towing Systems, across a coast-to-coast network of dealerships. Each of those dealerships carried different inventory. Each had its own Facebook page. Nobody was steering the fleet.
The corporate accounts told the same story in numbers. In August 2020, mid-engagement, the benchmarks we logged were still modest: 15,315 likes on the flagship Rush Truck Centers page, 818 Instagram followers, 263 YouTube subscribers. For a company of this size, the audience was a rounding error, and the inventory that actually moves the business (the trucks sitting on fifty lots) mostly never made it into a post.
The diagnosis: Rush didn’t have a content problem. It had a logistics problem. The trucks were on the lots, the buyers were on Facebook, and there was no supply chain connecting the two.
Pages with no system
50+
Each posting independently
The real problem
A Logistics Gap
Trucks on lots, buyers on FB
Inventory in posts
Almost Zero
The thing that moves the business
02
THE BET
Treat social like Rush treats parts: one supply chain, local delivery.
The obvious agency move was to consolidate: kill the location pages, run everything from corporate, call the fragmentation solved. We bet the other way. The location pages were the asset. A truck buyer in Atlanta doesn’t care what’s on a lot in Texas; the page that wins is the one showing the truck he can drive off this week. So we kept every dealership page and built the machine they were all missing.
One Hub. One
Workflow. Fifty
Last Miles.
Corporate Gets A Brand Engine
One workflow pulling inventory from every dealership into a central hub. One social team turning that feed into one content calendar across the entire network.
Every Location Gets A Sales Engine
Every dealership page kept. Each fed with its own inventory. Paid social localized to each dealership’s market and demographics. The trucks on your lot, to the buyers in your zip code.
Three Business Units, One System
Rush Truck Centers for anyone who needs a truck. Rush Bus Centers for school and city fleet administrators. Rush Towing Systems for tow operators. Same machine, different audiences, all fifty-plus of them.
03
THE WORK
The machine, part by part. Eight components that ran as one.
Over eighteen months the system published 2,126 posts, up 245% on the period before, and answered 3,070 inbound messages along the way. This is what it was made of.
The Feed
Central Inventory Workflow
Every dealership fed its inventory to one hub. What used to live in fifty spreadsheets and lot walks became one stream the social team could actually publish from.
The Engine
One Calendar, Whole Network
Dealer Manager Direction
Production On Location
Localized Ads Per Market
Three Businesses, One System
Weekly Calls, One Contact
2,126 Posts, 18 Months
“
People actually looking to buy. In the middle of the quarantine, Atlanta couldn’t keep up with callbacks.
Justin
Atlanta Dealership · Spring 2020
Link clicks
496,686
Impressions
29.7M
Posts shipped
2,126
04
THE INFLECTION
Spring 2020: the country locked down. Atlanta’s phones didn’t.
The moment we knew the machine worked wasn’t in a dashboard. It came through the weekly calls.
Leigh, our corporate point of contact, passed along that the Atlanta location was happy with the jump in phone calls over the past month.
Then Justin, our contact at the Atlanta dealership, told us he was running behind on callbacks in the middle of the quarantine, because the localized ads kept ringing his phone with buyers.
Not tire-kickers asking about a post. Callers he described as people ready to purchase. While showrooms everywhere went quiet, a dealership running on the inventory engine had more buyer calls than it could keep up with.
Justin · Atlanta dealership · Spring 2020
“People actually looking to buy.”
Spring 2020 · Quarantine · Showrooms quiet everywhere else
Atlanta’s localized inventory ads kept the phone ringing while the rest of the country’s dealerships went dark.
05
THE PROOF
Eighteen months, measured against the eighteen before.
Every figure from the Sprout Social profile performance report for August 15, 2019 through February 28, 2021, compared against the equivalent prior period. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, across Rush Truck Centers, Rush Towing Systems, and Rush Enterprises corporate accounts.
The Reach · Impressions, Engagement & Clicks
Metric
Result
Vs. Prior Cycle
Details
$
Metric
Total Impressions
29.7M
Result
+1,899%
Vs. Prior Cycle
Up from 1.49M · Rush Truck Centers FB alone: 21.96M
Details
$
Metric
Total Engagements
1.34M
Result
+1,682%
Vs. Prior Cycle
Up from 75,266 · engagement rate held at 4.5% per impression even as volume grew twentyfold
Details
I
Metric
Post Link Clicks
496,686
Result
+9,047%
Vs. Prior Cycle
Half a million trips from social post to inventory and dealership pages · the number the system was built for
Details
The Audience · Follower Growth Across the Network
Metric
Result
Vs. Prior Cycle
Details
R
Metric
Net New Followers
19,611
Result
+437%
vs. Prior
Total audience grew to 44,972 · up 194% period over period
Details
C
Metric
New Facebook Page Likes
13,330
Result
+424%
vs. Prior
The network’s core sales channel · LinkedIn added 6,199 followers (+210%) on the corporate side
Details
L
Metric
Video Views
989,086
Result
+1,285%
vs. Prior
Built on walkthrough footage from dealership lots and production-crew shoots across the country
Details
The Machine’s Output · Volume, Responsiveness & Scale
Methodology: Comparison period is January 28, 2018 – August 14, 2019, per Sprout Social. Instagram was brought into the system during the engagement and has no prior-period baseline, so its 1,446 followers gained and 1.45 million impressions are counted in totals but shown without a delta. Engagement rate moved from 5.1% to 4.5% per impression while impressions grew twentyfold, we will make that trade every time.
$111.5K
+245%
Posts published across the network in eighteen months
All fed by one inventory workflow and one calendar. The volume increase and the quality both came from the same pipe.
3,070
+645%
Inbound messages received, answered with 2,829 sent replies (+358%)
When inventory shows up in the feed, buyers start conversations. Every one was answered.
3
Business units
Rush Truck Centers, Rush Bus Centers, Rush Towing Systems, on one system
Each speaking to its own buyer type, each powered by the same inventory workflow and reporting structure.
496,686
Post link clicks to inventory
+9,047%
29.7M
Total impressions across the network
+1,899%
50+
Dealership pages · all fed · none killed
Location
asset
preserved
2,126
Posts · one calendar · one inventory feed
+245%
3
Business units · same system · different buyers
One operating
system
06
THE UNLOCK
Inventory is content. Move it like freight.
Rush already knew how to run a network: parts move from suppliers through hubs to whichever dealership needs them. Nobody expects fifty locations to each invent their own supply chain.
Social was the one part of the business still being run fifty different ways, and the fix was the same fix Rush would apply anywhere else. One hub, one workflow, local delivery.
That’s why the location pages stayed. The system didn’t flatten the network into one corporate voice; it gave every dealership a feed of its own trucks and a paid engine pointed at its own zip codes. Corporate got 29.7 million impressions of brand. Atlanta got a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing.
Running a brand across fifty locations?
We build the system underneath multi-location brands: one content engine, localized paid for every market, and a single weekly call instead of fifty inboxes. Let’s build yours.
Ready to Maximize Your Social Media
Potential?
We’d love to hear about your organization’s goals on social media. Get in touch with us today!
info@sociallyin.com
