A Guide to Multi-Location Social Media Marketing

Posted on October 25, 2024 in Blog

Whether it’s a few locations around town or hundreds of stores across the country, managing an effective, localized social media strategy isn’t easy. For many brands, deciding how to support individual stores or service areas is a choice between a one-size-fits-all approach and a disparate, decentralized strategy that sacrifices brand consistency and authority.

This guide offers several ways to streamline multi-location social media management and maximize the value of having a strong presence in several communities—or even several states.

Keep It Local, Keep It Personal

We’ll start with this: Local social media marketing, also known as social media localization, works. It’s the creation and management of social media accounts for individual locations, and it generates as much as six times the engagement of corporate content. Companies looking to support new locations can get strong organic engagement with unique, location-specific social media accounts on the right platforms.

The key to multi-location social media is leveraging the value of each store, service location, or office’s unique personality, community work, promotions, and product and service offerings while maintaining consistent “national” brand voice, tone, and values.

Local Social Media Engagement Strategies for Multi-Location Brands

An effective local business strategy should be clearly defined, acknowledge strengths and weaknesses, and be replicable across locations.

1. Establish Your Social Media Team’s Structure

Who decides strategy? Who gathers content? Who posts?

The most important decision for local business social media strategy is who’s in the mix. This can look very different depending on your brand’s in-house talent, access to a local social media agency, and the tools and resources to make great content.

In most cases, we recommend centralizing strategy to maintain brand standards and deliver a clear, consistent message system-wide, but leave the tactics up to each location.

2. Keep Content Creation Efficient

The ability of individual location owners to replicate national social media tactics and content categories does not mean duplicating, however. Creating a consistent playbook for every location reduces busywork (or reinventing the wheel) by sharing what works and what doesn’t while encouraging every shop to put its spin on each concept.

Provide your locations with templated graphics, a library of brand photos and videos, and a brand voice and tone guide to keep everyone singing the same tune. It’s often beneficial for the national marketing team to share insights into what content is working or which channels are driving the most results.

3. Every Local Owner Should Make Their Location’s Social Accounts Special

Sticking to national brand standards doesn’t mean each location can’t have its own personality. Local locations can highlight the people who make their store special, including staff and customers. They can share unique photos, stories, reviews, and events while sprinkling in national promotions and campaigns.

In some cases, national social media managers may need to vet location posts to make sure they’re up to snuff; consider asking locations to leave posts in draft or review for a gut-check before they go live.

4. Choose the Right Multi-Location Social Media Management Platform

Depending on the number of locations you’re working with and the frequency of posting, scheduling natively on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for dozens of locations can be overwhelming, if not impossible. Multi-location social media management tools designed for franchise systems and similar structures exist, with SoCi and Yext being the most popular, although we’re not huge fans of Yext.

Local social media platforms like these streamline posting and offer social media managers workflows like peer reviews, optimizing social posting times, and system-wide boosting. We help brands find the right tools or get more out of their existing software!

5. Get Influenced

Local social media influencers can be incredibly valuable and cost-effective. A local influencer should have a relatively large following in a small area, be it a city, town, or a specific neighborhood. Work with all-star customers to celebrate your products, services, events, and brand to earn street cred. Just be sure to keep it authentic; influencers should have a real connection to your brand and industry. Some brands require corporate sign-off on all local influencer campaigns; check with your home office before investing too much time or budget on your influencer game.

Social Media for Local Business Works …

… and it works better with an experienced agency. Oneupweb’s local social media services help multi-location companies support each store while growing the brand enterprise-wide. Tap into nearly three decades of industry experience to amplify your marketing and enjoy real results. Start the conversation or call (231) 922-9977 today. (Tomorrow works great