Franchising gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to own a business with assistance and benefits from an established company. These businesses play an integral role in the U.S. economy.
While there are best practices for how businesses utilize social media, franchise businesses are unique.
One of the biggest hurdles for multi-location businesses is following their umbrella company’s guidelines while simultaneously differentiating their own business from other franchises.
Grow Your Business with Social Media Marketing
Enter social media marketing.
An accessible way to streamline franchisor expectations with the franchisee’s unique goals is to implement a consistent social media strategy. In this article, we share six tips for social media marketing for franchise businesses.
Utilize a Content Governance Strategy for Coordination and Consistency
Franchisees starting off on their social media journey need a blueprint for how their content is to be planned, created and distributed. It’s a system of procedures that determines content priorities; provides guidelines on how content should look, feel, and behave; and assigns ownership to people within the organization. Creating a content governance strategy is the first step in merging franchisees’ and franchisors’ expectations and moving forward with adding unique ideas to differentiate each franchise location.
Implement Clear Brand Guidelines
As a franchisor, creating clear and concise brand and style guidelines should be a major priority for your social media marketing strategy. That way, a brand’s established style, tone and voice can stay consistent while still enabling the franchisee to branch out and share unique content relevant to their location and community.
Enact Detailed Policies
While policies aren’t always the most attractive thing when creating a social media strategy, implementing mandated policies as a franchisor will help franchisees avoid any violations of corporate policies, maintain expectations for appropriate and inappropriate use of their social media accounts, and prevent any legal issues that could arise as a result of a social media crisis.
Track Multi-Location Performance
The ability to measure performance for your franchise will illuminate the efforts and strategies you put forth and demonstrate to the franchisor that the franchise is heading in an upward direction. Analyzing the statistics for each piece of content on each social media platform will also help you achieve this. As the franchisor, any lessons, best practices, and occasional content could also be shared with the franchisees, helping everyone benefit.
Educate Your Franchisees
In tandem with setting brand guidelines and policies is creating a streamlined educational program for franchisees about social media marketing. Local franchisees can benefit immensely from this training, which can help mitigate any obstacles with social media, prevent social media crises, and highlight the monetary benefits of social media education to keep motivation high.
Maintain a Social Media Presence
Have you ever been a customer who goes to a company’s social media page only to find their most recent post was from two years ago? This is a serious red flag. The solution? Maintaining a consistent social media presence across all platforms.
A few ways to do this without it becoming a serious time-suck is to post curated content from other industry leaders and/or partners, cross-post content to all channels and utilize scheduling software so it will publish content for you.
Build a Franchise Marketing Strategy on Social Media Today
With a whopping 700,000 franchise establishments going strong, it’s abundantly clear that franchise businesses can be extremely successful. And while there are different options for implementing and executing a franchise marketing strategy on social media for multi-location businesses, going with a trusted marketing agency like GO2 Partners, with experience in helping franchise businesses, goes a long way.
