Month: August 2018

This is the second post in our Local Social Media Series. Catch up by reading our first post and checking out our Local Social Media Infographic. 

• What is this series all about? Our Local Social Media Series is designed to help multi-location and franchise brands improve their social media presence by engaging consumers at the local level. 
• Who should read this series? Multi-location and franchise brand marketers looking to boost their brand’s local presence on social media.

Creating and promoting original content can be challenging for any brand. For multi-location and franchise brands, that challenge is exacerbated when you have to spread that content across locations to reach hundreds or thousands of disparate local audiences. To help you overcome that obstacle, here are five steps you can take to create, distribute and promote content to engage local audiences on social media.

No. 1: Creating content at the corporate level

Before you can start distributing content across your locations, you need content to distribute. There are plenty of formats your brand can choose from to fuel the social pipeline, but it’s important that you create content based on your team’s skillset (or, hire an agency with the skillsets to create different types of content for you).

This content can range from long-form, heavily-involved projects like white papers and videos to simpler content like social posts and blogs. Regardless of the format, odds are you’ll be able to repurpose the content into a social media post.

Top 5 formats B2C marketers use to distribute content for content marketing purposes

No. 2: Organizing all the content you create

To get the most out of the content you create, it’s important to keep it all organized. Using a library or database allows you to access past content and leverage it to create new pieces. This will also allow franchisees, local employees, regional marketers and others across your brand to leverage previous content like images and video to create new engaging social posts.

To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s a screenshot from Rallio’s social media management dashboard. (Note: Rallio is a technology partner of Mindstream Media Group).

No. 3: Determining the right distribution channels

Once you have a system for creating and organizing your brand’s social content, you need to determine which channels you want to promote that content on. Choosing the right platforms depends a lot on your brand – namely, the types of content you’re creating and the audiences you want to reach. Here’s a quick look at some of the top social platforms to help you decide.

Facebook

As the most popular social media network on the planet with roughly 2.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great way to reach the masses. A substantial percentage of pretty much every generation and audience type is on Facebook so it’s great for almost every brand.

Instagram

With more than 800 million monthly active users, Instagram is the way to go if you’re looking to promote highly-visual content pieces. If your goal is to drive website traffic – either to blog posts or product and service pages – Instagram is not a great option as it doesn’t allow links in posts.

LinkedIn

The social network for professionals boasts roughly 500 million monthly active users including 40 million students and recent college grads. LinkedIn is geared towards reaching professionals so it may be a better choice for B2B marketers.

Twitter

With 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is the perfect platform to help your brand drive conversations and comment on trending topics.

YouTube

The video sharing platform has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users. YouTube is a great platform if your brand plans on creating lots of video content.

Pinterest

With roughly 175 million users, Pinterest is well-suited for sharing visually-appealing content like DIY projects, infographics, before-and-after images, etc.

Top 5 social platforms B2C marketers use for content marketing purposes

No. 4: Publishing content across locations

Here’s where the benefits of leveraging technology really come into play. By using a technology tool like a social dashboard, you can publish national content at the local level.

For an example of how this works, let’s look at Rallio’s dashboard again. Syncing your corporate and local profiles in the dashboard allows you to automatically publish or schedule posts across locations on various social platforms.

No. 5: Monitoring the performance of your social content

Once you go through the process of creating, managing and publishing your content, it’s important to make sure those efforts are generating engagement and results for your brand. Again, technology plays a significant role here. By using a local social dashboard, you can monitor the performance of your content across locations and provide your franchisees and other team members access to that reporting.

By distributing corporate content across local pages, multi-location and franchise brands can significantly improve their social media presence. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. For multi-location brands, it really boils down to coordinating in-house and external content creation efforts with a technology that allows you to distribute posts across pages.

Hopefully, this post helped you understand how to leverage corporate content at the local level. In the next post of the Local Social Media Series, learn how multi-location brand marketers can help their locations create brand-compliant, highly-engaging social content at the local level.

Want to Fast-Forward your local social media efforts? Contact Mindstream Media Group to learn more about our Content Marketing and Social Media services.

This is the first post in our Local Social Media Series. Make sure to catch more helpful tips for marketers by subscribing to our blog.

• Who is this for? Multi-location and franchise brand marketers looking to boost their brand’s local presence on social media. 
• What is it about? This series will teach multi-location and franchise brands how to increase their locations’ social media presence by engaging local consumers, carrying on a conversation with followers and strengthening relationships with existing and potential customers. 

In today’s tech-driven, always-connected world, there’s no shortage of marketing channels to deliver your brand’s message to target audiences. But getting those audiences to respond to those messages can be challenging. Audiences are much more likely to respond if they trust you and have established a relationship with your brand.

For brands, one of the best channels to build relationships is social media. Unlike most marketing channels that only allow a one-way flow of information from a brand to an audience, social platforms are designed to generate conversation. When brands start the conversation by posting content, consumers have the opportunity to keep it going by replying, commenting, liking, sharing, retweeting, snapping, pinning, posting, etc.

Think of social media like a big party where your customers and potential customers are the guests and your brand is the host. No one wants to go to a party where all the guests sit quietly listening to the host ramble on about themselves. People go to parties to socialize and interact. For brands, being a good host means sparking conversations that encourage your guests to interact.

Where this can become really challenging for multi-location brands is getting the party started at the local level. As a multi-location brand marketer, you not only have to keep the conversation going on corporate social media feeds, you also need to find a way to foster local engagement.

The importance of local social media activation

There are roughly 200 million social media users in the United States. On average, these users spend almost an hour per day on social platforms, according to eMarketer.

U.S. social media users

For brands with multiple locations, 85 percent of engagement from these users takes place on local pages – not the brand profiles – across social media networks.

The tendency for consumers to engage with local pages means that multi-location brands need to rethink their approach to social.

Where companies primarily make spending decisions for local social media marketing

A better way to approach local social efforts

Let’s look at two ways multi-location brand marketers can approach managing social media efforts at the local level:

1. A bottom-up approach where content creation, social posting and engagement is handled at the local level.
2. A top-down approach where the brand creates and shares content, then works with locations to localize content and engage with consumers.

The first solution probably sounds great at first. You save yourself some work while your brand benefits from content that’s more relevant to local audiences.

But, the bottom-up approach comes with some drawbacks – local employees usually:

• Have a job to do and it isn’t to manage social posts so they might not have the time or expertise to create content.
• Aren’t professional marketers so the posts they do create might not be professional-grade.
• Don’t have as solid of a grasp on your brand’s guidelines which can lead to content that’s not brand compliant and/or legally dubious.

A top-down approach mitigates these issues by keeping your team in charge of creating the content. The trick is getting the content out there. Individual locations don’t always have the time or the expertise to publish regular social posts, even if your brand is supplying them with the content they need. And, for multi-location brands, publishing posts manually across social platforms can take forever.

How to activate social content at the local level

Luckily for multi-location brands, there are ways to streamline this process. If your multi-location brand is new to local social management, here’s a quick guide to help get you started.

Step No. 1: Set up local profiles and establish a parent-child relationship

Start by setting up local pages for each location across social media networks. To make sure the brand is still in control of social content, make sure to establish a parent-child relationship between your brand’s profile and your local pages.

For an example, let’s look at how to set up local pages with a parent-child relationship on Facebook.

From your brand’s Facebook page, simply select Settings on the top right, then choose Locations on the bottom left.
Make sure your brand page (i.e., “parent” page) doesn’t have an address. If it does, you’ll see a warning message and be asked to remove the address from your main brand page.

You can then either add locations one at a time or import multiple locations by uploading a spreadsheet. If you already have local pages set up but they’re not tied to your corporate page, you can claim them through the business manager.

(Check out this Facebook help page for more info.)

Step No. 2: Complete and localize local profiles

Next, make sure your brand’s local pages are completely filled out. You should also work to localize content like profile images, cover photos and business descriptions so local consumers know they are following and engaging with the right location.

Step No. 3: Leverage technology to activate social content at the local level

Once you have all the local pages set up, you could manage posts by platform. But, this is time-consuming and unnecessary. Rather than managing posts individually across sites, it’s more efficient to bring everything into a unified dashboard.

Partnering with a MarTech company or an agency like Mindstream Media Group provides your brand access to tools that allow you to manage an array of local social media tasks.

Local social dashboards allow multi-location brands to:

Post content: Manage content and publish posts across social networks for all your locations from a single dashboard. And, when you share content at the local level, many of these dashboards are able to automatically localize the content for each location.

Approve local content: Set up permission levels to require approval for local content. And, when locations create engaging in-store content like images of customers and employees, some of the dashboards host digital release forms to document approval from the people in the picture.

Manage engagement: Monitor customer engagement, respond to reviews and manage your overall reputation on select sites directly from the dashboard.

Boost content: Manage boosted posts at the national, regional or local level to spread your message to new audiences.

In upcoming posts, we’ll dive deeper into these features and explain why they are so crucial for multi-location brands. We’ll also provide tips on how your brand can get started with local social activation.

Read more from our Local Social Media Series, and make sure to subscribe to our blog.

Interested in how Mindstream Media Group can improve your brand’s local social presence and Fast-Forward Your Business? Contact us to learn more.