For Franchises, Consistency Matters for Twitter Accounts

By BEN HEINEMANN Franchises have multiple locations across multiple territories, each serving a unique demographic and audience. Just like the brick and mortar locations of your franchise, you may have a social media presence for each location, each with their own voice serving up content targeted to their specific market. However, things can start to get messy if there isn’t some sort of semblance across all of your social media accounts regardless of location – Brand X is still Brand X no matter what market it serves, and preserving this voice is just as important as the one-on-one communication social media provides between your franchise and your customers. We asked Josh Becerra, Co-Founder of SMBtweet, to give us some tips for brands to make sure their message is consistent yet engaging and tailored for different markets. Make the Franchisee Account Look and Feel like the Master, or Parent Page “More often than not, the official corporate Twitter account is always excellent. The design is great, the content is great, and they are likely paying someone full-time to manage the feed,” says Becerra. “Where I see a lot of differences in execution is at the franchisee level. They need the most help when thinking about how to leverage twitter for their local market, and it all starts with a feed that looks and feels like the parent page. If corporate has a set of design standards and two to three avatars a franchisee can chose from, you’re already creating a consistent look and feel.” Highly-targeted and De-Centralized Communication is Key for Franchisee Feeds “Sometimes, franchisees don’t have the best communication practices or relationships with corporate, but both parties need to realize that Twitter is important for franchisees to see it as a tool for highly-targeted and de-centralized communication,” explains Becerra. “In order to do that, corporate needs its franchisees to have a de-centralized focus. For example, a Minnesota-based location might have different products than a location in Florida, or different locations may have different specials or promotions happening at different times of the year. Using de-centralized communications via Twitter is key to really making these different products and promotions really stand out, helping both corporate and the franchisee.” Meta-data Matters “A lot of franchisees don’t realize that the name of the handle they choose or the text in their Twitter bio is all searchable,” says Becerra. “It’s very important to pay close attention to what you have in those spaces so that you’re not only searchable, but also for when your local customers search for your type of business, your Twitter profile is included in the results. It’s also important for franchisees to remember to include a link to their parent brand’s Twitter or Facebook page, or corporate website. I’ve seen too many franchisee Twitter accounts that don’t even reference the parent brand.” Build the Right Audience “The only way your Twitter feed is going to be effective is if you have the right audience, targeted to the location that you serve,” says Becerra. “It doesn’t help to have spammers, dead accounts or Twitter robots among your followers, nor does it help to follow them – this does nothing to help reach your business’ goals of connecting with the people in the community. A majority of those you follow on Twitter should be people based in the community you serve. This not only brings more value for the franchisee, but for the franchisor as well.” Josh Becerra is the Co-Founder of SMBtweet, an online tool that helps build an audience of potential customers that is based on the location and keywords a user inputs for their business.