GO LOCAL WITH SOCIAL

National social media campaigns may drive awareness, but hyper-local campaigns actually drive business. Franchisees shouldn't overlook that.

- KAREN SPAEDER

When franchisees buy into a system, they can generally rely on the parent brand's name recognition and business processes. But here's something a franchisee should not rely solely upon: the parent brand's social media marketing.

Why? Because doing so misses out on the real opportunity of social media. It isn't just to build a brand-it's to actively drive business and engage with customers. That must happen on a local level, with local social media accounts operated by local people.

I'm the vice president of communications at Rallio, a social media management company, and we see this mistake happen all the time. Franchisors typically create social profiles on behalf of their franchisees and syndicate corporate content to these pages. Franchisees then believe that their parent company's social media content covers all their needs, so many don't create social content of their own. As a result, franchisees' pages mostly all look the same-with only corporate posts and no localized personality.