Multi-location businesses face unique challenges when marketing their brands and offerings on social media. While single-location or solely online businesses focus on a singular campaign to drive engagement and sales, multi-location companies need to cater to the needs of each market location.
To get the best results from social media, businesses with multiple locations will need to effectively manage their campaigns, which is where multi-location social media management solutions can help.
In this blog, Katelyn Baginski, our Social Media Manager, will look into multi-location social media tools you can use to overcome the various challenges of these campaigns.
My Expert Opinion on Multi-Location Social Media Management
When a business with multiple locations uses social media, it’s crucial to maintain a balance between consistent branding and unique content for all locations. Not every audience will be the same, but you must create a cohesive and coherent brand identity that resonates with all audience segments as you build trust.
With effective multi-location social media management, including sufficient strategies and tools, you can get the most from your social media marketing efforts. These campaigns can then effectively tie into other marketing campaigns for every location and your brand as a whole.
Understanding the potential challenges you might face and which solutions to look for can help you bolster your social media marketing efforts as you continually optimize them over time.
The Challenges of Multi-Location Social Media Management
Your global and local messaging can work together with the right approach, but it can be difficult to determine how to keep both connected and consistent.
There’s a potential risk of inconsistent messaging across all locations, leading to disjointed strategies that fail to connect with all of your target audiences.
The following are some of the specific multi-location social media challenges you might face:
- Coordinating Multi-Location Campaigns: When launching social media strategies for several locations, it’s often difficult to coordinate them and facilitate a collaborative effort. For instance, you might need to tailor messaging to each location’s communities when promoting a new product or service launch.
- Managing Multiple Platforms & Accounts: When using several social media platforms, you may also struggle to effectively manage these platforms and their respective accounts without consolidating them into a single dashboard.
- Measuring ROI: Multi-location businesses may have a hard time measuring the ROI of each location and factoring each location’s revenue into the company’s based on local and overarching goals.
Tools and Platforms for Multi-Location Social Media Management
There’s plenty of multi-location social media management software you can use to effectively monitor and optimize your campaigns.
The ideal tool will allow for centralized control with localized flexibility to help you manage every aspect of your brand and each location. A cohesive and central dashboard can make managing all social media accounts and profiles significantly easier.
You should also select a multi-location social media management tool that automates every aspect of your campaigns. For example, your solution should help automate post scheduling to ensure consistent engagement with national to local audiences. Reporting and content approval workflows will also be simplified, making management even easier.
Robust software will give you what you need to take full advantage of social media.
Best Multi-Location Social Media Management Tools
Struggling to find the right multi-location social media management software to meet your requirements? Here are some of the best options on the market for small to large businesses:
- Hootsuite: This platform is often ideal for managing multiple social media accounts. With some additional configuration, it can work for location-specific campaigns. It includes a unified dashboard, bulk scheduling capabilities, social listening, and plenty of other features for effective management.
- Sprout Social: If you need multi-location social media management software that can provide in-depth reporting and analytics for all locations, Sprout Social is a great tool to use. You’ll be able to see precisely how each location is performing as part of your overall social media strategy, helping you determine how to progress and improve your efforts.
- Agorapulse: When customizing social media posts across your locations, Agorapulse allows you to easily and quickly customize fields for each post and schedule them, whether you need to customize addresses, dates, or signatures. The platform also offers numerous reports that can give you in-depth insights into each location’s performance and compare them.
- SocialPilot: Another great option for multiple locations is SocialPilot, which offers several critical features that can help your campaigns excel. Some of these features include bulk scheduling, collaboration tools, and AI-powered content suggestions, helping automate and simplify various processes.
- Sendible: This all-in-one social media management platform allows you to manage all social media accounts with a single tool. Using this solution, you can make content creation easy by using a single content calendar that schedules posts for all platforms.
- Sked Social: This tool is specifically intended for multi-location businesses, allowing you to automatically schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, with Dropbox, Canva, and other third-party integrations to simplify content management and development.
Local Engagement Strategies for Multi-Location Brands
It’s not enough to have the best multi-location social media management tool—you must know how to properly use it to engage with your audiences.
Social media is all about building relationships with your target audiences. The right approach will help you better understand and consistently interact with local communities, showing that you value them and the people who inhabit them.
In the process, you need to know how to empower location managers to become social media champions. Foster good communication with all of your prospects and customers via the platforms they use, and have management put a more human face to your brand and each location.
Strategies That Really Work
To help your location managers make the most of social media channels, here are some effective local social media engagement strategies for multi-location brands:
- Hyper-localized Content Creation: Each location will have its own unique flavor. No two towns are quite the same, making it important to understand the needs and preferences of audiences at all locations. Through your market research, and with the help of local management, you can develop hyper-local content that really resonates with each audience segment. For instance, you might highlight certain local personalities or other landmark locations or events unique to each community, showing your willingness to participate and not just infiltrate.
- Encouraging User-Generated Content (UGC): Another way to connect with local communities is to entice them with contests and show that you value their input, encouraging them to create UGC in the form of posts discussing their experiences with your brand or showing how they use your offerings in creative ways. You can then repurpose this UGC for your own marketing and advertising purposes, which could further imbue your brand with a sense of personality and community.
- Collaborating With Influencers: Local influencers, especially smaller nano- and micro-influencers, tend to have loyal followings that you can connect with through them, whether it’s via product recommendations or sponsorships. These audiences will be much more likely to trust your brand if an endorsement comes directly from these personalities.
Measuring Success With Multi-Location Social Media Metrics
You won’t be able to tell how well your campaigns are doing at each location without specific measurable metrics. The goals you set will help you determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track with your tools.
There are plenty of goals you might have in place, whether they’re for your encompassing social media strategy or individual campaigns at specific locations. For instance, you might want to boost brand awareness, increase engagement, or maximize sales for a particular location.
Depending on your goals, you could then track one or more of the following metrics for multi-location social media campaigns:
- Engagement Rates: This KPI tracks how often people interact with social media posts, whether it’s via likes, comments, or shares. The specific type of engagement will depend on what you want to achieve, with more shares helping contribute to increased awareness.
- Sentiment Analysis: The right tools can also perform sentiment analysis, which can indicate how people perceive individual posts and your brand overall. This type of analysis uses a combination of AI and natural language processing (NLP) to “read” the emotions behind social media comments, posts, and mentions. This element is crucial in reputation management.
- Conversion Tracking: Keep track of how many people perform a desired action for each post and location. For instance, a conversion could count as someone completing a contact form, making a purchase through a shopping post, or subscribing to your newsletter to contribute to franchise email marketing campaigns.
Be sure to regularly check reports for each location and compare their performance against each other based on your goals. If you notice that any particular location is underperforming, use actionable insights in your reports to determine the next approach.
Over time, as you allocate your budget and optimize accordingly, you can get all of your locations on the same page and ensure they contribute to your base strategy.
Also, make sure you have a good handle on the patterns for each location, as they are likely different and will require different maneuvers based on past performance. For example, the sentiment analysis for one location might differ considerably from another, indicating a need for a different approach to communications for an area with poorer sentiment.
Best Practices and Next Steps
Using the right multi-location social media management platform and strategies, you can get the most from your multi-location campaigns on all social media channels.
To further secure long-term success with your efforts, here are some additional best practices and next steps to take:
Create Strong Brand Guidelines
In keeping your branding consistent across all locations and social platforms, develop solid brand guidelines for every location to follow. These will serve as instructions to help turn each location’s management team into ambassadors for your brand, spreading your message to each location’s community.
Your employees could then adapt these guidelines accordingly to fit in with the culture of each community without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Create a Central Content Calendar
Determine when is the best time to post across all platforms with a set content calendar. For instance, you might want to post about new product launches, brand updates, or other content that can go out to every branch of your business.
At the same time, certain tools can help you personalize these posts for each location using custom fields and dynamic posting features. In turn, you can speak more directly to every community while ensuring each post gets out there.
Take a Customer-Centric Approach
Always focus on the customer’s needs and wants in your communications and branding. To keep your customers content with your brand, practice responsiveness; respond to people’s comments and show that you truly care about your customer base.
Make Data-Driven Decisions
Through regular data monitoring and social listening, you can make informed decisions. Reliable tools will provide you with in-depth reports and actionable insights that help you stay on your toes. You can then compare current data to past performance to gauge progress and determine how to continually improve your social media efforts.
Connect With Ignite Visibility for Multi-Location Social Media Management
If you’re in need of effective management for multi-location social media campaigns, Ignite Visibility has the resources and expertise to help your business thrive. We can provide you with a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that works for multiple locations, whether you’re a small business looking to expand or a large franchise with hundreds of locations.
We’ll work closely with you to determine your unique needs and help put together a winning strategy using the best solutions available.
With Ignite Visibility by your side, you get:
- Access to some of the best multi-location social media management platforms
- Help from industry experts who know what local audiences want from branded social media
- Content development to put together successful social media posts, landing pages, and more
- Continuous monitoring and reporting for all locations and regular updates
- And much more!
To get a start on your next campaign with us and see what sets us apart, get in touch with us and we’ll discuss your specific needs.
