I actually had my posts flagged and had angry members of the community insult me because I was supposedly making the rest of the advertisers in my field look like cheats for charging too much. I used to post a service on Craigslist and I used to post in my ads that I guaranteed the lowest prices. I give you that last comment from real life experience. The community doesn’t seem to have any problems with prostitutes and scammers posting on Craigslist, but if you make a post like “Cheapest prices in town!” you’ll get flagged because someone thinks that is not the right thing to say. Read the section about ‘Ghosting’ to find out more. They certainly seem to have enough time on their hands to single out certain posts to be prevented from appearing when they want to, but they don’t for other things. Sorry, but that just doesn’t wash as far as I’m concerned. The Craigslist staff argues in their Q&A section that the flagging system is a necessary feature because they don’t have the manpower to check each and every post for abuse. This leads to a bunch of crazies running around flagging posts that have absolutely nothing wrong or objectionable about them. Posts that are flagged, and get deleted without any staff revue. To make matters worse, instead of Craigslist having some sort of review or control over this, they don’t. They begin to think they are a part of something special and they get an unnatural attachment to it. By allowing the community to flag anything that they find objectionable, people get a rush of power and abuse this privilege. Craigslist on the other hand gives these crazies more power than they should have. Unfortunately there are crazy fans of everything in this world, but they are treated as crazies. The brown nosing loonies that go overboard in their attachment to a person, place or thing. When I say ‘Craigslist community’, I’m referring to the crazy people that behave as if they were Craig Newmark, or as if they owned Craigslist. With communities like this, who needs enemies? Let me clarify something, when I say the ‘community’, I’m not referring to the average person who posts a product or service and does nothing more than that. The Craigslist so called community behaves more like a pack of rabid animals than a community. To learn more about advertising your used car inventory effectively-on Craigslist or otherwise-reach out to the Get My Auto team directly.The Craigslist Community – A Bunch of Crazies! Get My Auto specializes in marketing services for used car dealerships-including website development, Facebook Ads, Craigslist, and more. Learn More About Our Craigslist Solutions Get My Auto’s Craigslist Wizard tool can automate the entire process, and help your dealership really make good use of Craigslist ads. The best way to ensure that your ads aren’t flagged-and that they actually get results, generating leads for your dealership-is to work with a comprehensive Craigslist solution, which can help generate stronger ad copy and also provide structure and strategy to your posting schedule. Posts either early in the morning or late at night can be especially beneficial. Posting at the same time every day will make it far easier for Craigslist to flag you-so try to vary it up, and experiment with posting at different times. For larger dealerships with a more robust Craigslist strategy, it may be wise to post from a few different dealerships. At the most, you want to advertise 75 to 80 percent of your inventory on Craigslist.Ĭraigslist will monitor the posts form any given IP address, and if that address posts too aggressively or too frequently, it could result in the ads getting flagged. Unless you have an extremely small dealership (100 cars or less), you can’t get away with advertising your entire inventory-so be smart and strategic about only posting the cars you know are “hot” in your market. Remember that a single ad will stay live for at least a week, so you don’t need to be too aggressive with your posts. Set up a schedule wherein you post a few ads per day, spaced out over a few hours, rather than flooding Craigslist all at once. How to Prevent Your Ads from Getting Flaggedįirst and foremost, it’s important to spread out your ads, rather than post them all in rapid succession. Here are a few tips from the automotive marketing experts at Get My Auto. One such hurdle is that, if you don’t have the right strategy, your posts can get flagged as spam-meaning your whole Craigslist strategy could collapse.įortunately, there are some practical ways to avoid this fate. It comes with many benefits, but also a few significant hurdles. For used car dealerships, Craigslist can be a powerful tool for advertising inventory.