Franchisee Level Social Media Marketing: Pros and Cons

Once you plan to expand your business and create a Franchise network, the next big thing is to market your franchises as well. These days, there is no marketing without social media but do franchisees also require separate social accounts is the question.

Here are some of the pros and cons of having individual social media accounts for each franchisee.

Pros of Franchisee Social Media Accounts

01. Separate Location for Each Outlet

Franchisees can publish their own physical address on their social media page. They can also directly interact with their local clients and respond quickly to their queries.

A dedicated social media account will easily help in location-based targeting.

02. Individual Franchisee Information is Available

If franchisees has separate social media pages, then they will be able to provide clients with location-specific offers and details like phone number, address, etc.

03. Unique Content for Each Franchisee

Social Media marketing at the Franchise level leads to better engagement with the local audience. Franchises can create targeted content, and send meaningful feedback to the Franchisor to help fine-tune business level social marketing.

04. Local Network of Social Followers

Separate social accounts help in tracking customers loyal to your brand and creating a local network.

For instance, if every local franchise has a separate social page, then most of their customers will like that page. This not only helps to understand location-specific customer profiles, but also widen the social marketing net from a one-size-fits-all entity to a multi-tiered marketing network.

Cons of Franchise Social Media Accounts

01. Difficulty in Effectively Maintaining Separate Social Accounts

Multiple social accounts are difficult to maintain at the franchise level and the brand runs the risk of diluting its consistency. The business will have to deal with a whole host of issues, from grammatical errors to misrepresentation of the brand.

With separate accounts, each franchisee may post varied opinions on a particular issue that may conflict with messaging consistency.

02. Content load can become an issue

For every franchisee account, separate content needs to be created on a daily basis, which means franchise owners need to commit bandwidth for social media - liking, sharing, commenting, etc, and sales promotions at the outlets may take a back-seat.

03. More Expenses

With multiple social media accounts, your franchises need to pay close attention to maintaining brand standards, which comes with a cost.

This often requires at least part-time effort from a team to manage the account, which in turn, increases the operating cost.

04. Additional Training Expenses

There is no guarantee that whoever purchases your franchise have a good working knowledge around social media and it’s functioning. Being a franchisor, it will be your responsibility to train them as you have to maintain your brand reputation and consistency.

For more information on the pros and cons of separate franchisee social media accounts, Contact Us