socialHANDLER's objective is to provide a system that supports best practice for social media publishing in the franchise sector.
We are leading the way in franchising through thought leadership and innovation. Our focus is in the area of social media. Our goal is to maximise social media potential for franchisors and franchisee networks. To do this we have built SocialHANDLER.online.
SocialHANDLER enables head office marketing managers to create social media posts and campaigns and share these to their franchisee networks at the click of a button. This frees franchisees to publish with confidence and provides them with more time to focus on growing their businesses.
Why SocialHANDLER was built
Warren Buffett once said "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
We have recognised that in the social media age franchisors and franchisees need to consider the benefits and risks. This means being prepared to look at the opportunities and concerns and, where required, to do things differently.
Today it may be said that it takes 20 years to build a brand and only one tweet to destroy it. Careers have been built and broken via social media publishing. Brands enhanced and damaged.
We identified that people operating under franchise brands, need to be supported and protected. However, the means to do this were not readily available. Our new technology SocialHANDLER delivers in one place for the benefit of all. With SocialHANDLER, franchise brands can be genuinely authentic and consistent through social media publishing, working with and supporting franchisees one post at a time. It removes the risk of poor content and mitigates reputational risk for franchisees and franchisors.
It is now recognised that social media publishing is an essential part of the marketing mix that supports business growth. This is the case for all franchisors and their franchisees. In the UK specifically, there are now 45 million social media users*. This equates to 67% of the entire population. Social media is being used to understand people and brands, to engage with people and brands, and to support commercial decision making. Either ignoring social media or leaving it unmanaged at the discretion of individual franchisees or employees are not viable options today.
Franchisors and franchisees therefore have a vested interest in understanding social media and publishing effective content that supports visibility, reputation and growth.
Few enter franchising to be social media experts and few have the necessary understanding and skills required. This means that franchisee networks have a varied range of expertise which creates a threat to brand and personal reputations. This is especially the case where franchisees are left to their own social media publishing activities. To resolve this issue, we recognised the following challenges:
- Franchisees depend on franchisors for marketing content
- No main-stream social media publishing system exists that supports central content creation and distribution to networks
- Social media content publishing does not work effectively as part of an operations manual format. This is because the publishing of social media content is time critical – to have impact it has to be relevant, immediate and responsive, essentially about what is happening now.
We built SocialHANDLER!
SocialHANDLER makes ‘one-to-many’ publishing a reality. It enables Franchise Head Office’s to use their marketing expertise to distribute well-crafted social media content, for use by their franchisees. It supports brand integrity and franchisee publishing with confidence.
SocialHANDLER is being welcomed by franchisors and franchisees alike. This is because inconsistent social media publishing is a clear current issue that needs resolution. SocialHANDLER resolves the issue through an affordable, easy to access and effective technology. SocialHANDLER therefore is placed to enhance professionalism in franchising, in the area of social media publishing.
How SocialHANDLER works
Click here to view our Video explainer
- Franchise Head Office signs up to SocialHANDLER and invites franchisees to join
- Head Office expert creates and distributes agreed content to franchisees via SocialHANDLER
- Franchisees access content sent to them via SocialHANDLER and approve it for publishing
- Approved content is published to franchisee’s social media channels
- Franchisees can create and publish their own content with head office permission
- Head Office can seed social media posts to display each franchisee’s own phone number, email address and website landing page link in selected posts. This supports lead generation.
Franchise brands and networks currently using SocialHANDLER
- Caremark
- Minster Cleaning
- Trend/Granite Transformations
- Rainbow International (from July 2019)
Measurable Impact
Measurable impact is focused on the areas of less work, less risk and more time for franchise networks. Reported estimate is up to a 5% saving in franchisee working time by using SocialHANDLER.
Client testimonials
“We adopted SocialHANDLER to support our franchisees with social media and improve the consistency of our external communications across the franchise network. SocialHANDLER helps us increase the brand awareness of our offices and of Caremark by regularly sending our franchisees high quality and consistent content. It is also saving our franchisees’ time and effort in creating social media content.” Teva Herve-Serna (Caremark Digital Marketing Coordinator)
“We adopted SocialHANDLER to improve our social media pages as we don’t post much content on it and therefore this seemed like a good solution for it. It is simple and quick to use. It helps to raise our social media profile and leaves us with more time to focus on growing our business.” Abhay Shah, (Caremark Hillingdon Franchisee)
References
*https://www.avocadosocial.com/latest-social-media-statistics-and-demographics-for-the-uk-in-2019/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/socialhandleronline/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/social_handler
For your free demo please:
Email nick@socialhandler.online or call 023 8027 5710