Social media can be a challenge for franchise brands and for franchisees in particular. A franchisee never signs up because they aspire to share social posts. Yes, social media is an opportunity but it’s also time consuming and has hidden dangers.
So what’s the best way forward?
1. Key things for franchisees to focus on when taking on social media publishing are:
- Think profile – who should be following your social media Business Pages and why?
- Think reader – what is of interest to the readers that follow you?
- Keep true to the brand – read content the head office produces and mirror their tone of voice.
- Use permission assets – only use images and videos that below to the brand.
- Engage with your followers - share content and respond. Identify what your followers like reading and watching and build more content on those themes.
The best opportunity for any franchisee to gain relevant followers to their social media business pages is to invite clients to engage. This is best done directly after service is provided as (hopefully) the client is highly satisfied at that time.
2. Make it easy and be clear what’s in it for them
Have a leaflet handy with a QR Code that your client can scan to download your page(s) and ask them to follow.
Tell them what you share and why you hope that will be of interest to them.
Ask them for ideas for content they would like to see and find beneficial that is in line with the service you provide as a franchisee.
Sketch out a content plan so you have an idea for a theme to follow. It saves time in the long run and keeps to themes of interest.
Decide what day(s) in each week you will post and stick to those days and times. It helps to gain interest and engagement.
The more interested your clients are in what you share the more they’ll click on links and read the content.
The more they click through to your Pages the more the social media algorithms will serve up the content you publish in your follower’s time lines. The opposite is true.
3. How can franchisors help franchisees to maximise these benefits and give back time?
We have developed SocialHANDLER to support franchisors to provide great content to franchisees from head office. It’s like Hootsuite but built for franchising. Head office creates and franchisees publish with localisation in the posts such a phone numbers and links to the franchisees own website.
For franchisors that want to support franchisees to publish consistently great content from central expertise this is the way forward for you. Check out the video below and send a demo request to info@socialhandler.online