What has two arms and two legs but can go in 289 directions at once? Each of your franchisees on social media. Eek. How do you keep marketing messages, branding, and customer experience consistent with, quite literally, so many cooks in the kitchen?
Fear not, franchisor: Here’s how to plan, execute, analyze, and maintain a successful franchise social media marketing strategy that all your franchisees will get excited about.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media guidelines template to quickly and easily create recommendations for your company and employees.
What is franchise social media marketing?
Franchise social media marketing is promoting your brand and engaging customers at both the corporate and local levels, while ensuring messaging and values remain consistent across all social profiles.
In a centralized corporation, the company owns all locations (or branches) and there is one chain of command. Simple.
In contrast, an individual or another company owns each franchise company location. These branches are technically separate entities, although they must report back to the parent organization, pay licensing fees, and follow the brand’s established practices.
One of the most well-known franchise examples is McDonald’s, with over 38,000 locations worldwide. Each restaurant is individually owned and operated by franchisees, but customers see the same signage and menu items — and hopefully, have the same experience — at every location.
Franchisor: A company that owns the trademarks and rights to a brand who sells licenses allowing franchisees to operate business locations using the trademarked brand.
Franchisee: A person or company who pays a licensing fee and recurring royalties to open a business leveraging the parent company’s existing brand, name, services, and other proprietary property.
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The unique challenges of franchise social media marketing
Enforcing brand guidelines
You want franchisees to make the most of social media marketing to grow their (and your) business, but how do you avoid a cringe-worthy faux paus, like using an outdated logo in marketing materials?
Answer: Creating a detailed brand guidelines document and keeping it where all franchisees can access the latest version, along with your brand assets.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media guidelines template to quickly and easily create recommendations for your company and employees.
Keeping content quality consistent
Besides using the right visuals and brand voice, there’s also the somewhat ambiguous judgment of social media content “quality.” What’s good when it comes to content anyway?
Examples of consistency can be as simple as ensuring each post is free of spelling and grammar errors. Or sticking to one exclamation point instead of five. You know, the simple things.
These quality standards should also be part of your brand guidelines document.
Dividing responsibilities
Will your corporate head office handle all social media marketing, using one account per platform? Will you create separate brand accounts for different regions or languages?
Or, will each franchise open and maintain their own social media accounts?
Neither approach to franchise social media marketing is wrong. Just be sure to document your structure in your social media marketing strategy.
Tracking performance and ROI
Was the last Black Friday promotion effective? Or was it only effective in a certain market? Or only for a certain franchisee? What did they do differently on social compared to the other franchisees?
Getting effective performance data is important for all businesses, but especially for franchisors managing teams of franchisees.
Using social media for customer service (effectively)
Providing customer service over social media is no longer optional: 40% of your customers now expect you to help them on their preferred social platform. Over half (53%) are more likely to buy from brands who offer customer service via chat. And, unsurprisingly, 94% of people say positive customer service makes them more likely to buy from you again.
You better hurry, too: 40% expect a response within an hour and 79% expect one within 24 hours.
So what does all that mean? If you’re not already solving customer problems on social media, start now. (Don’t worry: I cover how to effortlessly get started with social customer service later.)
Reduce response time (and your workload)
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