More franchisors are realizing that not only is social media a powerful tool for promoting their brand, but it can also be very effective for local franchise marketing when owners know the right way to market through these platforms. As a result of this realization, many franchise operations are making significant investments to help train and educate their owners about using social media for local franchise marketing.
Whether you’re a franchisor or the owner of a local franchise, if you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing, let’s take a look at how to get results, social media’s role in PR and how to measure the effectiveness of a social strategy:
Getting Results from Social Media
One of the most common hesitations business owners of all types have about social media is being able to generate real results. Many business owners are worried that they’re not going to generate any tangible results from the time and effort they invest into social media.
While that is a valid concern, the good news is there are proven ways to ensure that social media usage will lead to actual business results. The first step in this process is to identify the most important social networks for a specific business. While it’s useful to have a presence on all the major social sites, chances are that one or two will drive the majority of results.
Once you determine where to focus your efforts, the other most important component is to stay consistent. The most common reason that businesses fail to see the type of results they want from social media is they don’t stick with it. Although it can take a little time to start building momentum, consistently posting and engaging will lead to measurable results.
What’s the Connection Between Social Media and PR?
Local franchise owners know just how much they can gain from targeted local media coverage. What’s great about social media is it can work very well for supporting traditional PR efforts. Not only is social media a great way for a local franchise to promote any news coverage they get, but it can also be very useful for reaching out to local media contacts and building relationships that lead to coverage.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Social Media Strategy
Although it can be a little tricky to attribute exactly how many leads or new customers you generate through social media, there are still plenty of ways to measure the effectiveness of a social media strategy. One of the best is to look at what kind of traffic different updates drive. By using an analytics program to see what visitors do once they arrive at your website from a social media channel, you’ll be able to see what kind of content does the best job of attracting engaged visitors. This information will be very useful for guiding your future social media efforts.
If you are a franchisor or local franchise owner who’s interested in developing and executing an effective social media strategy, contact us to arrange a free consultation.
This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at https://www.webstrategyplus.com/social-media-for-local-franchise-marketing/