2024 Franchise Social Media Marketing: Your Guide from A – Z

Are your clients’ franchise social media marketing efforts falling flat?

You’re not alone.

Winning followers and driving conversions and sales requires your clients’ franchise businesses to go beyond posting fun and catchy daily posts. 

Franchises also have the extra challenge of developing a unique voice while aligning with their brands. 

Knowing how and where to start can be tricky, considering all these things. 

That is why we’ve created this guide. 

We’ll cover the nuts and bolts of franchise social media marketing, including tried and tested tips to help your clients hit the ground running and give them a good chance at success.

What you will learn

• What is franchise social media marketing?
• Franchise social media marketing: What are centralized and decentralized strategies?
• What are the top strategies for effective franchise social media marketing?
• Ready to achieve franchise social media marketing success?

What is franchise social media marketing?

Franchise social media marketing refers to promoting brands and engaging customers at corporate and local levels via on-brand content and engagement strategies on social media profiles. 

[Must read: Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Agencies]

It involves creating social media content that resonates with local audiences but aligns with the brand’s values and main message.

Franchise social media marketing: What are centralized and decentralized strategies?

There are two main franchise social media marketing strategies: Centralized and decentralized. 

Centralized strategy

A centralized franchise social media marketing strategy is about managing all the social media activity from one corporate level. 

The franchise headquarters decides and directs the social media content, engagement initiatives, and posting frequency (among other things) across all locations. 

All the customer interactions, campaigns, and posts are managed and approved by a single central team. 

It ensures a consistent brand image across all locations’ content to avoid misalignment and potential PR disasters from off-brand posts. 

The downside is that centralized strategies can be inflexible, with no room for local context. 

It can lead to a disconnect between your clients’ franchises and their local audiences, which can result in potential customers and followers falling through the cracks. 

[Must read: Hyperlocal Social Media Marketing for Agencies: Tips, Examples, Etc.]

Decentralized strategy

A decentralized strategy allows franchisees like your clients to control their social media pages, content, and campaigns. 

It lets your clients be agile and incorporate local events, trends, customer needs, and feedback into their strategies without waiting for approval from headquarters. 

The strategy allows your clients to create highly localized social media content that better resonates with their local audiences and communities. 

One drawback to this decentralized strategy is potential branding inconsistencies in the franchisees’ social media content. 

Plus, Tracking and supporting each location’s social media marketing efforts can take a lot of time and resources. 

The key is to use modern social media management platforms like Vista Social. 

The platform provides a central hub to make planning, developing, managing, and tracking all your clients’ social media profiles, posts, and campaigns efficient and effective. 

What are the top strategies for effective franchise social media marketing?

Ensure successful social media marketing for your clients’ franchises with the time-tested strategies below. 

1. Set main office and franchise social media marketing goals

The best way to track and measure your clients’ social media marketing efforts is to set overall company goals and specific objectives for each franchise. 

For instance, franchises managing their social media profiles and pages will likely play a bigger role in engaging audiences and providing customer service than headquarters. 

That said, your clients’ social media marketing goals for their franchises can include the following:

• Achieving customer service satisfaction survey scores of 90% and above
• Increasing followers and engagement rates
• Responding to customer Direct Messages (DMs) within one hour

Vista Social’s social media engagement feature can centralize and streamline the management of your clients’ DMs, comments, mentions, and reviews. 

The feature includes a smart Social Inbox that lets you filter, organize, label, and assign interactions to ensure seamless management and timely responses.

While your clients’ social media goals are more specific to their franchises, their overall goals can be more brand-focused, such as the following:

• Track and improve brand reputation and awareness
• Refine social media marketing efforts based on analytics insights and best practices 

2. Develop clear social media guidelines

Your clients’ franchise businesses should have critical guidelines, such as:

• Social media policy. A social media policy guides each franchise location’s content creation and distribution, from the language and tone to the branding
• Brand guidelines. Your clients’ brand guidelines include all the visual aspects of their brands, such as their color palettes, logos and the specific versions to use in certain materials, trademark symbols, and more
• Do’s and don’ts. Social media guidelines should include do’s and don’ts that clearly outline the rules of content creation and sharing across franchises. The do’s and don’ts should also include clear expectations to equip local social media teams to post with confidence while staying within the guidelines 

Create brand-consistent content for your clients’ franchise businesses easily with Vista Social’s social media tools. 

The free tools for social media pros and creators include the following:

• AI captions generators
• Hashtag generators
• Username generators
• Text-to-emoji and emoji-to-text translators
• Content and text similarity checker
• Brand voice generator

Use a centralized tool or platform that lets all franchisees access the social media guidelines.

Include your clients’ visual assets, such as logos and brand colors, so everyone uses the latest versions in all posts. 

3. Set a standard publishing workflow

Franchise social media marketing must be efficient to be effective.

However, this can be challenging when handling hundreds of profiles, content, and campaigns across multiple franchises. 

The solution? Standardize your social media publishing workflows. 

[Must read: Create Your Social Media Marketing Workflow: w/ Tips & Steps]

Leverage Vista Social’s social media publishing feature to schedule your clients’ posts for auto-publishing. 

For instance, you can schedule one post to auto-publish across multiple connected profiles. 

Upload the image or video and customize the post by adding links, hashtags, emojis, etc.

Generate fun and catchy post captions in a flash with the AI Assistant. You can also generate caption variations to match the brand voice and tone your clients’ franchisees use. 

After creating and scheduling the posts, you can create approval workflows to automate sending posts for review and approval.

The post approval workflow allows brand managers or the headquarters’ social media team to efficiently check the posts for brand consistency before they go live.  

4. Track and measure social media performance

Analytics data is crucial to determine whether your clients’ social media marketing efforts for their franchises are paying off. 

It also helps you measure their overall growth and break down each branch’s performance. 

Vista Social’s social media analytics and reporting feature makes this easy. 

The feature includes a comprehensive dashboard and lets you create custom report templates to uncover each franchise’s post performance and engagement rates.

[Must read: Ultimate Guide: How to Calculate Your Social Media Engagement Rate]

You can also set the reports to automatically generate and send to managers, headquarters, franchise social media teams, and other users.

Monitoring and analyzing social media performance across franchises helps you determine what’s working and what needs refining.

It also tells you whether each franchise is reaching its goals or contributing to the company’s overarching social media marketing objectives.

Ready to achieve franchise social media marketing success?

Handling social media marketing across franchises can take a lot of time and energy, but success is within your reach with the right strategies.

Start by understanding the ins and outs of franchise social media marketing, including the best tools.

Invest in platforms like Vista Social to work smarter, not harder.

Create your Vista Social account now.