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Social media content and advertising are commonly used in businesses of all sizes, but franchisors and multi-location brands have additional challenges when it comes to social media setup. Use these three tips to save your brand from common pitfalls. (In priority order)

1. Put your locations on the Facebook map.

Look at any significant national brand like Starbucks or Target and you will see a locations tab on their Facebook page that shows a map listing the nearest location to you and can be zoomed out to show all of the locations. This is the best practice on Facebook for all multi-location brands including franchises. But how do you do accomplish this?

Option A: You are a very large national brand with ample budget and can go through Facebook API or can utilize a partner like MomentFeed. This is the Big Foot of solutions that is talked about but has rarely, if ever, been seen in practice.

Option B: Start over. Create new pages for each locations and add them to the map. This solution is best for emerging franchise brands that do not yet have owners with existing pages because this will infuriate franchise owners who have existing Facebook pages and more chaos will ensue when the owners or the corporate team attempts to merge the pages.

Option C: Do it manually. The solutions above are not suitable for most brands, especially brands who have franchisees with Facebook pages that have been around for a long time, which makes this the only viable solution for establishing a Facebook parent child relationship with existing location business pages. First of all, you will need a business manager account. Fun fact: you can only create a maximum of two business manager accounts per person per lifetime. (No exaggeration -- I have had a ticket into Facebook support about it for two years.) Please note, this will only apply to Facebook pages that were created as business pages and will not apply to locations that used a personal profile as a business page. You will need to reach out to each location and ask them to like the main brand parent page from their Facebook account and then send you the link to this page to you. You will then add it to your business manager account under pages and the owner will receive a request to add you as a page administrator. The Facebook page owner will need to accept this invitation. This gives the corporate team administrative access to the location's Facebook page. This is a best practice for many reasons including the ability to transfer ownership of the Facebook page in the event of a resale or close down the page if necessary, to recover the Facebook page from ownership from a former employee's Facebook profile and in case content that is off brand needs to be removed. This is a very delicate topic because franchise owners may not want to provide this level of access to the franchisor, which is why it is critical to have this outlined in the social media guide and policy mentioned below. Once the parent page has been granted admin access to the page and the location is on the map of locations for the parent page, it is not able to be revoked by the location page administrator. 

2. Create a social media guide and policy. Some brands allow location owners and social media managers to post more custom content than others, which is up to the discretion of each brand's leadership. There are pros and cons to each. Primarily the pros are that locations can post relevant, localized content and interact with their communities. The cons are that not all locations have the bandwidth to maintain social media profiles with content and some locations may post content that does not follow brand standards. The worst case scenario is if a location (or anyone) posts something in representation of the brand that is inflammatory or reflects negatively on the brand in any way. You will want to clearly outline what is and is not allowed  from a content standpoint as well as stipulate that all social media accounts created on behalf of individual locations are owned by the franchisor. This is not out of the ordinary because generally, any marketing materials created for the brand by an individual are property of the franchisor, however it is helpful to call this out specifically in a social media policy. This will make it more palatable for owners to follow the instructions above because they may be less caught off guard by providing administrative access to the corporate office. The social media policy should also outline if the brand marketing team at corporate for the franchisor will post or remove posts on the local pages at any time and what those scenarios include.

This does not come up often, but it can be extremely helpful in preventing problems longterm. Adding a social media engagement guide that outlines the structure and best practices of other practices. 

3. Provide easily editable content for franchise owners or location social media managers. The concept here is that when franchise location owners and social media managers have optional, customizable and engaging content that is on brand and easy for them to publish to their sites, they are more inclined to use it and less likely to post off-brand content.

For help with this setup or examples, contact Danielle Yuthas.