Top Social Media Challenges Franchisors Must Resolve

Business owners today are overwhelmingly using social media as an integral part of their marketing strategy, and this includes franchisors. If you lead a franchise there are several steps we recommend taking to ensure a cohesive and successful social media outreach among all franchisees, which are as follows:

Develop a Handbook Spelling Out Your Social Media Style/Guidelines

Franchisors are responsible for maintaining the image and reputation of a prominent brand, and social media is a vital part of that. It’s important that a consistent brand voice be established across all platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. You also need to ensure that your franchisees consistently match this voice throughout their own social media accounts.

Implementing this practice will likely require you providing them with a social media handbook that addresses the following aspects:

  • Overall voice
  • Type and tone of content
  • How to engage and respond to comments and reviews
  • Style of images

One of the most difficult challenges will be developing this handbook, but it’s importance cannot be minimized as it will have a huge impact on your business. Your handbook will help your franchisees create and manage their own social media accounts successfully. Plus, an easy-to-follow handbook will strengthen your brand’s social media profile.

Form an Overall Social Media Strategy for Your Brand

This is in addition to developing your social media handbook. Depending on the type of franchise you own, your strategy may involve your separate franchise locations. It may be that you would rather not allow your franchisees to create their own social media profiles, and instead manage all social media outreach and activities from headquarters, to include promoting each of your franchisee’s locations.

If you’ve determined that your franchises can have their own social media profiles, your strategy guidelines should be spelled out in your handbook. Your guidelines should tackle how to set up a social media profile for success, best practices, and recommend tactics and strategies. Developing a successful strategy will require research, so this will take time.

Keep Track of Your Return on Investment

As a franchisor, it is important that you find ways to keep track of your ROI from your social media efforts. It may be fairly easy to track the performance of your own social media accounts, but it will likely be more challenging to track those of your franchisees. However, this is no less important, especially if you provide them with marketing funds.

Conclusion

It’s important for most businesses today to have an aggressive social media presence. There are millions of active users across all platforms, so where better to reach out to potential customers if you are running a well-known franchise? Take the advice outlined in this article as you get started.