Franchises live and breathe in guidelines and regulations in order to maintain consistency. Given that social media marketing entails certain legal risks, it is necessary for franchises to create a social media policy for every franchise social media system.
The social media policy needs to ensure compliance with the brand marketing plan and procedures and cover the general ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ regarding copyright law and confidentiality concerns.
Here are 3 key tips to create a successful social media policy for franchisees:
Contents
Train and show them
Telling franchisees what they cannot do will be part of every franchisee social media policy, but many franchisors may find that the success of their policy will depend more on their ability to give franchisees examples of what they should do by providing proper social media training. This includes:
- Best practices for desired content
- Recommended frequency of the posts
- Which networks to use
- How to interact/respond to users
Be up-to-date
A social media policy should not be set in stone, so you should always keep up-to-date with changes on social media networks. This means devoting some time to search trends and changes and communicate about them to the franchisees.
Make sure you ask for the franchisee’s feedback on their social media marketing experiences so they can give you valuable information about the business and customers.
That feedback can also help you re-write policies since the social media policy should be tweaked as the business gains experience and as the social media networks evolve, so listen to your franchisees and also always keep up-to-date with changes on the networks.
Create an internal social media network
Many franchise businesses created an internal social media network to be used by the franchisees. It can be located on the brand’s website or it can simply be a Facebook private group.
This helps the franchisor to identify the overall online maturity of the group, assists in developing an acceptable online language for the brand, begins to build a repository for great content to share on the public channels and is a great place for them to access the social media policy.
