Get started with Hootsuite - for franchise administrators

If you run a franchise or an organization with multiple locations, you can use Hootsuite to build your brand, engage with your community, and generate leads. As an administrator, you can manage multiple social network accounts in Hootsuite. For example, you can use Hootsuite to manage a Facebook Page, two X (formerly Twitter) accounts, and three Instagram accounts - all in one place.

As the top-level administrator of your business, you can monitor all social activity, share content and templates with location admins, monitor and optimize customer interactions, and measure the success of social efforts across your organization. Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Know your goals and needs

Before launching a social strategy for your business, it’s important to consider the goals of your brand and the needs of your franchisee admins. All of your content, no matter where it’s shared, should align with your marketing and social media initiatives and support your company’s online reputation. Whether you want to increase brand love and community engagement or improve the customer experience, solidifying and communicating your goals with your social teams will shape your social strategy. Sharing these goals, as well as clear voice and branding guidelines, with all users is essential to maintaining a consistent brand identity.

To learn about social marketing best practices and strategies, see How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 8 Easy Steps.

Familiarize yourself with organizations and teams

A Hootsuite organization consists of individuals, teams, and shared social accounts. Your Hootsuite customer account manager may have created a Hootsuite organization for you or you may have created one during onboarding. To see if you have an existing organization, go to Account, and then select Social accounts and teams.

Your organization is the place where you'll create teams, add members to them, set permissions, and add and manage social accounts.

Typically, each of your business locations will function as a team in your organization. As the corporate administrator, you’ll manage all team permissions as an organization “super admin.” Your location admins will serve as team admins for their locations, and they'll have either admin or default permissions for your organization.

Get to know Hootsuite

Social engagement tools in Hootsuite consist of three essential tools:

• Streams, where you can monitor social activity for your industry and all of your locations.
• A content creator for creating and publishing new content.
• A content calendar, where you can view and manage scheduled posts and drafts.

Monitor feeds and engage with your audience

Hootsuite streams are feeds that display the content from your connected social accounts and allow you to participate in conversations relevant to your industry. You and your local teams can use streams to:

• Follow activity across all social accounts.
• Engage with your audience.
• Monitor specific keywords, topics, hashtags, brand mentions, and competitors.

To get started, go to More, select Streams, and then select Add stream to create a new stream. To organize or categorize your streams, add boards by selecting New board and choosing a stream type to create in that board.

Create a few boards and streams and scroll through them to see what works best for you. You can easily create and delete streams, so don't be afraid to explore.

• Learn more about adding streams.
• Learn how to use boards to organize your streams.
• Read suggestions on how to organize your streams and set up the best streams for your business objectives

Create, schedule, and publish content

You and your organization’s team members can create, schedule, and publish social content to numerous social networks from one place, at one time. To get started, go to Create, and then select an option.

Select a social account, and then create your post. In addition to text, you can include mentions or tags, links, images, videos, GIFs, emoji, and hashtags.

As you compose your post, you can preview how it will look on the right. When you're ready, you can publish it, save it as a draft, or schedule it for later.

For additional information, see:

• Create and publish posts
• Save and edit drafts
• Create and schedule content in a calendar

To manage scheduled content, access your drafts, and manage approvals, go to Plan. Your calendar shows your scheduled posts and all of the content you've published over the last year. See Manage your content calendar.

Collaborate with content libraries

You can use content libraries in Hootsuite to share pre-approved post templates and images. Using these libraries helps to ensure brand adherence and consistency and saves your employees time when creating posts. You can maintain multiple libraries and share specific content with selected teams. Applying content tags makes it easy for team members to find relevant assets.

You and other top-level admins can manage all content libraries, including settings such as availability and expiration dates. Local admins can manage the libraries available to their location. They can create and share content libraries and add or edit content in the library. All other organization members can use content from the libraries available to their teams. You can use internal notes to let team members know when and how to use assets. Learn how to create assets for a content library.

Monitor customer care with topics and tags

To ensure timely replies from the right people in your organization, you may want to route certain messages to specific colleagues. For example, the corporate Hootsuite admin for a chain of stores could quickly assign a customer complaint about a particular location directly to the social admin for that location, ensuring that it is immediately addressed. See Route messages to specific teams.

You can also use tags and topics to categorize messages, like positive interactions or campaign-specific replies. You can then automatically assign messages based on tags and topics. For more information, see the following:

• Create topics to organize and route conversations
• Create tags for Inbox 2.0 conversations
• Create and manage automatic actions

Measure performance with Analytics and UTM parameters

To keep track of the performance of your social media activity across multiple social networks and all your locations, use Hootsuite Analytics. Analytics measures account, post, campaign, and team performance for your organic social activity on numerous social networks.

You can view the performance of the most recent posts, use built-in overview reports to review and share the most important metrics for your social accounts, run manual reports on one or more social accounts, and compare performance over time. To learn more, see Get started with Hootsuite Analytics.

You can also use Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your team's interactions with customers and prospects. By reviewing work volume, CSAT scores, and resolution times for individual teams and members, you can gauge productivity and collect information for future social strategy goals at various locations. See Create an Inbox 2.0 report in Analytics.

Additionally, you can see where your social efforts are driving website conversions. To track which individual posts resulted in the most web conversions, you can use UTM parameters. These are tags that associate links with the posts that contain them, designed to work with any analytics system. To learn how to use them, see Apply a UTM parameter to a link. To learn more about enhanced web analytics options, you can connect directly with your customer account manager.