Besides developing brand guidelines for social media and creating a plan with actionable goals, here are three considerations for an effective franchise social media strategy to align their corporate objectives to individual franchise unit expectations.

Solution 1. Map Corporate and Branch Goals

To avoid any brand conflict between the corporate and the branches, developing an umbrella social media strategy is advisable.

Features of Corporate Social Media Playbook

• Basic Style Guide: This section consists of your corporate logo, colors, mission & vision, language and response style and tone guidelines.
• Collective Goals: This section includes the expectations for total followers and shares across locations and a KPI to have each franchise contribute an equal percentage or more.
• Actionable Goals: This section includes actionable goals that define your posting strategy; posting x times per day or driving the number of campaigns each quarter.

Features of Branch Social Media Playbook

• Basic Style Guide: Follow Corporate Social Media Playbook to stay consistent with brand positioning and value proposition for better recall value.
• Individual Goals: This section includes the expectations for total followers and shares to be achieved by the unit. You can incentivize this for greater participation and leaderboard rank.
• Competitor Analysis: This section includes insights from competitor best practices that yielded a better success rate in market occupancy and engagement.  

Solution 2. Create a Social Calendar

Social media is the ideal medium for telling a one-of-a-kind story. Get started with one or two accounts and gradually expand as your franchise business grows. Utilize a social media management platform with scheduling capabilities to alleviate the pressure of daily publishing. Additionally, these technologies are scalable, which means you can begin with a single account, such as the corporate account, and gradually add users, such as franchise locations.

Having a social media calendar saves a significant amount of time and resources and alleviates the pressure on lesser franchises that lack the bandwidth or skill to maintain social media. Lookup for social schedulers and go with the trial version to see if your team is comfortable using it. Finally, workflows that offer the option to need approval for posts to maintain brand consistency and avoid social media disasters.

Solution 3. Measure and Optimize Efforts

As cliche as it may sound at this point, you cannot improve something that you do not measure. Thus, setting up social media analytics for your corporate and franchise locations would be advantageous. Additionally, tagging and brand keywords can assist in organizing your postings and determining how they are received. You can categorize group postings according to particular campaigns and characteristics, such as individual franchise locations vs. the national franchisor account.

A franchisor may require monthly or quarterly reporting on the social media performance of each branch. Typically, all the social schedulers generate extremely understandable reports that enable you to monitor your overall strategy and zero in on any specific areas where each branch could improve. They may also be easily assembled, allowing franchisees to stay on top of their social media performance on a shoestring budget.

Conclusion

Social media management is not easy—and it’s even more difficult when you’re managing or supervising multiple accounts in multiple locations.

An effective franchise social media strategy for scheduling your content calendar in advance can help alleviate the strain on your bandwidth. With a well-defined plan and linked objectives at all levels of your business, neither the franchise nor the franchisees will be flying blind.

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