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Over the years I’ve worked with numerous franchisees for brands such as Zipyard, Bluebird Care, Raring2Go, Home Instead, Right At Home and many more

We’ve worked with Franchise owners running £10 million plus turnover businesses

What’s become clear from working with so many, is that franchisees are no different than any other business owner when it comes to social media – some excel at it and on the other side some fear it, don’t know how to use it or have no inclination to use it

The thing is – Social Media is here to stay, so you either jump on it or get left behind

At the beginning of 2018, it has been reported that a massive 83% of the UK adult population now use social media – that is 4 in 5 of your potential customers

In this weeks blog we look at how Franchises can use social media more effectively

1.Give guidelines, but don’t control

If you’re the franchisor – give guidelines, but don’t control

Twitter recently introduced Anti-Spam policies, which was based around organisations posting substantially similar content across various social channels

It’s something Franchises are guilty are

Often the national franchise operator will offer a “Social Media Lite” service for all national Franchises for a low monthly fee

or

Manage Social Media in house at a national level simply because not all franchises around the company have the skill set to manage social media themselves

When this happens the social media updates are bland, repetitive and overly corporate

Human Marketing = Smart Marketing – so allow your individual franchisees to put their own voice into the social media and humanise it – whilst giving the guidelines to give some consistency across the brand

2. Put stories at the heart of social

People buy into stories, not adverts

Brands need to put stories at the heart of social media

We are natural born story tellers

As children at primary school we produced content every day and we got rewarded for it, be that a smile from our parents or a day trip out

As children at secondary school we got creativity knocked out of us as we studied facts and figures for exams

Rediscover your inner child and put those stories, the people in your organisation and your customers at the heart of your social media

3. Empower digital champions
Success does not come without training

You’re trained yourself and your staff in every area of the organisation and then you hand the social media to someone with zero marketing experience and zero training

You need to empower digital champions in each area of your business to truly understand and grasp how powerful social media can be for your business

Marketing is not just something that sits in the marketing department removed from the rest of the business

It’s in every department of the business and is on the frontline facing the customers

Training needs to be an ongoing process as the organisation grows and more and more digital champions get added to the mix to help with that natural storytelling

4. Measure measure measure
If you measure something, you can improve on it

Traditional advertising can be vague and is an outdated model

The local newspaper will talk about readership and throw huge numbers about – but how can you know out of 90,000 readers, how many will look at your Quarter page advert on page 17

With social media you know exactly how many people every update has reached, what engagement (i.e action) has been taken on each post and you have huge data on which messages are most successful with your audience

Social Media is about being a creative geek

Be creative with ideas, but be a total analytical geek and seek to understand what the insights and analytics on each platform are telling you

5. Share best practice
Being part of a franchise is like being part of a digital agency like ours

At Altrincham HQ we get to take the data from huge amounts of social media clients, which gives us insights as to what updates are working across the board

We can take ideas from totally unrelated businesses to inspire what we do for other clients

It’s a huge advantage to have such data at our fingertips

As franchisees around the country you get to share what is working on social media in your location for the brand and share best practice

There are various systems that can be put in place from Whatsapp Groups to monthly emails to quarterly meetings to discuss ideas and best practice

 

NEED HELP WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA?
Chat to about Social Media Marketing for YOUR organisation , so we can better understand YOU and what will grow your organisation

We can only find out what is unique to your business by chatting with you

Look at our Social Media Training and Social Media Management services

Or

Please call Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk

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Alex McCann

Author Alex McCann

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