6 Best Practices for Managing Multiple Profiles

Of all the industries and organizations that have a social presence, one of the most complex to manage is a franchise business. From restaurants and remodelers to consumer and financial services, there are countless questions and options to weigh. The one I hear most often is this:

Should we have one social profile, or should every location have its own?

It’s a tough call. On one hand, having a single profile is much easier to manage and with your followers all in one place, growth is faster, too.

On the other hand, people feel tied to their communities, and tend to engage most heavily with local content.

My own recommendations depend on several factors, but I typically encourage franchise businesses to set up a profile for each location. That way, corporate can publish posts that are relevant to the entire audience, and each storefront can publish unique content that appeals to their local audience.

I’ve worked with restaurants that have multiple locations over a regional footprint, but it was the seven years I spent crafting marketing strategy and managing social media for a national remodeling company with 120+ franchise locations that led me to develop the best practices I’m sharing with you today.

These are lessons that can be applied whether you have two locations or over 100.

Best Practice #1: Go Live for Set Up

You might be tempted to have your marketing team (or your agency) handle all of this, or leave it to your franchisees, but I highly recommend walking each franchisee through the process on a live 1:1 video call.

This way, you ensure that the username is correct, you know the password, and the franchise doesn’t have to be responsible for doing this on their own. Trust me, you can’t set up all the profiles on your own, because you’ll need to use a different email address for each profile. I know what you're thinking - you can just set up a new gmail or yahoo address for every location. Speaking from experience, you may be able to set up the first few, but Instagram quickly catches on to your IP address and will prevent you from setting up more, even locking you out of the ones you’ve created. Privacy laws require multi-factor authentication (MFA), which means you have about 60 seconds to type in a code sent to your phone or email address or you risk being locked out of the accounts.

Choose a naming convention so that every handle is structured the same way (this makes it easy for potential followers to locate you), and keep a spreadsheet of all locations along with the associated username, password, email address for MFA, name and contact info for each person with access to the profile and/or to the social media dashboard.

Best Practice #2 Encourage Local Content

The purpose of creating unique profiles for each location is so that you can engage followers with local content that’s relevant to them. Without any unique local content, every franchisee’s profile will look the same, with the same corporate sponsored posts. That leads to repetition in your audience’s feeds which can lead to prospects following only the corporate account rather than their local franchise. Best case scenario is that they follow both the corporate account and the local account.

If you're not sure what your followers want to see from your brand, you can use social to gather information (Instagram story polls are great for this!). Share curated content from local news sites and other businesses and use colloquialisms to show you're part of the community, and consider supporting local charities.

Partnering with other local businesses to offer giveaways or discounts is a great way for local franchisees to build community and trust with their audience. I shared some tips for tie-in partnerships in last month’s 5 BY 5 blog (https://agencyab.com/partner-marketing-is-soaring/).

Best Practice #3 Move at the Speed of Social

Reviewing and approving hundreds of posts each day from 120 different franchisees is a full-time job (and then some). My client’s corporate marketing team required 48 hours to approve each post, which is a lifetime in social media. Brands need to be able to publish at the speed of social, and the best way to do this is to use a social media dashboard that offers a fast, easy approval workflow. I’ve been a Sprout Social partner since 2011, and still find it to be the most comprehensive and user-friendly tool available (DM me, I'd be happy to give you a demo or answer questions).

In addition to the right software, creating social media templates not only makes content creation faster and easier for your franchisees, but it speeds up the approval process for your marketing team. You might start with a series of templates based on the type of content your audience is looking for, such as employee spotlights, holidays, blog posts, industry tips, and customer testimonials.

Best Practice #4 Advocate for Advocacy

If the majority (76%) of people surveyed?said they’re more likely to trust content shared by individuals over content shared by brands, it’s fair to say that your employees’ personal LinkedIn profiles are critical to the success of your company’s social media marketing strategy. When you set up your franchisees’ social media presence, be sure to include an advocacy platform (we use Sprout Advocacy) so that they can share relevant thought leadership with their network, build trust, and engage potential customers. With an advocacy tool, your brand controls what content is available and can provide post copy options for timid users. It also gives franchisees the power to personalize brand content to fit their local voice and editorial calendar.

Best Practice #5 Incentives for the Win

Professionals want to learn from the peers. Your franchisees want the same. Pay attention to the data. Look for the topics and posts that earn the most engagement and those that spark conversations among your audience. Also pay attention to corporate posts that have high engagement across all profiles.

Spotlight franchisees’ success by sharing mini case studies and insights to inspire other locations/franchisees.

Incentivize your franchisees by rewarding the location with the highest engagement, the largest percentage of follower growth, and the most improved performance. Make the incentive relevant to your audience. For example, you could offer to boost the highest engaging post with a small paid media budget to help the winning franchisee grow their audience.

Most importantly, hold regular training and best practice share-out sessions to set every location up for success.

I'm so grateful you took the time to read this month's newsletter. Until next time - Stay savvy, marketers!