Should You Have a Social Media Account for Each of Your Business Locations?

If your company has more than one location, you may be wondering if you need to create social media profiles for each individual location. While your first instinct is probably "yes," you need to consider the ramifications that having a social media profile for each of your locations would have on your social media management strategy. Assuming your business has a presence on multiple social media platforms, creating individual location profiles on each platform could double or triple (or more) your workload for managing your social media presence.

Should You Handle Social Media Management Locally or Globally?
To help you decide whether you should have local social media profiles for each location or implement a global social media management strategy, here are the advantages for each option:

Case for Local Social Media Accounts

• Helps larger companies to implement a more granular social media strategy.
• Allows each location to provide a more unique and local offering to followers.
• In franchise situations, gives each legal entity its own social media page.
• Enables businesses to offer separate social media pages if languages are different (for example, a Spanish-speaking page and an English-speaking page).

Case for Global Social Media Management

• Saves you time and allows for more efficient social media management.
• Creates a more consistent voice for your brand and helps to avoid customer confusion.
• Makes it easier for you to manage your social media presence from one location.

If you're hesitant about taking a global approach to managing your social media presence, keep in mind that you have the ability to target social posts by location and create photo albums to keep your locations separated but under one social media account.

How Should You Handle Social Media Management for Your Business?
While there are advantages to both managing your social media presence locally and at the global level, how do you decide which approach is best for your business?

Here are several questions to ask yourself to best make this determination:

1. Do you have several different buyer personas?
The typical business has multiple buyer personas. However, if these target audiences are extremely different, you're going to want to be able to serve them with unique content that is tailored to their needs. For example, if one of your target demographics doesn't speak English, it would be best to have a separate social media account to communicate in their preferred language.

2. Do the potential local social media accounts that you could create have different branding strategies?
Consider the various verticals of your business. Is each vertical so different than the other that branding would be negatively impacted by having just one social media account for your business? Disney is a great example of a business that needs to have multiple social media accounts. Disney has separate social media pages for characters, movies, games, resorts, and more. If the company tried to consolidate all of its messaging efforts into one social media account, Disney wouldn't be as effective at using social media to build its brand.

While larger companies are typically the ones that would have several different social media pages, some smaller businesses choose to have a separate social media page that is dedicated to handling an important aspect of the business, such as customer service. Having a dedicated social channel for handling customer complaints can help ensure that issues are resolved promptly.

3. Do you have the resources to manage multiple social media accounts?
In order to manage your social media pages effectively, you need to have the resources to do so. Unfortunately, most small businesses do not have a team that is specifically dedicated to handling social media management day in and day out. If you need to have different social media pages for your various locations or business verticals, a solution is to outsource social media management to a professional agency that has the capacity and manpower to handle your social media accounts.

4. Do you have a way of showing a difference in business locations or verticals in your social posts?
If you want to take a global approach to your social media presence, do you have a way of differentiating your business locations or verticals in the social posts that you publish? For example, adding watermarks to photos can help your audience to decipher the content from your different locations.

All in all, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to social media management. If you have multiple locations or different business verticals and aren't happy with the results that you're getting from your social media strategy, it may be time to consider establishing local social media accounts. The great thing about social media is that it's easy to test modifications to your strategy and review analytics to determine what will work best for your business.

Could you use some assistance with social media management? Contact us at New York Ave to learn more about the pros and cons of managing several different social media pages for your business versus taking a global approach to managing your social media presence.