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 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

Your Hootsuite customer account manager will help you set up your organization, teams, members, permissions, and social accounts. However, you’ll want to make sure you know your way around organization settings in Hootsuite.

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 composer for creating and publishing new content
• Planner, where you can view and manage scheduled posts and drafts

Monitor and engage with social accounts in Streams

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 Streams and 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.

• To learn more about adding streams, see Your first boards and streams.
• To learn about using boards, see Use boards to organize your streams.

Here are some additional resources we recommend reading to get the most out of Streams:

• For suggestions on how to organize your streams and how to set up the best streams for your business objectives, see Practice social listening and engagement with Streams.
• For details about using Streams to engage with your audience in each social network, see Engage with your audience in Streams.

Create, schedule, and publish content

You and your organization’s team members can create, schedule, and publish social content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok from one place. You can also publish content to multiple social networks at a time.

To get started, point to Composer, 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
• Schedule a post

To view or manage scheduled content, go to Planner.

• Use the Calendar view to review scheduled posts in a weekly, monthly, or list view, or to manage your drafts.
• Use the Content view to access your Content Library and schedule posts in bulk.

Collaborate with content libraries

You can use content libraries in Hootsuite to share pre-approved post templates and images for your users. Using these libraries helps to ensure brand adherence and consistency and saves time for your Hootsuite users. 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.

Monitor customer care with assignments and tags

To ensure timely replies from the right people in your organization, you may want to assign 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.

You can also automate content assignments. As a corporate admin, you can auto-assign inbound messages based on specific keywords. For example, a restaurant chain could create an automated assignment to monitor incoming social messages for keywords relating to specific franchise locations, and then automatically route those messages to team members in those locations.

Assigning messages also helps you categorize and track inbound and outbound messages (see Add tags to track inbound posts and Add tags to track your outbound posts). Active automations continue to work even when you’re not signed in to Hootsuite.

You can also use tags to categorize and assign posts, like positive interactions or campaign-specific replies. You can apply a series of tags to individual posts in Streams based on keyword themes like sentiment or location. This action can be applied to Twitter profiles (@mentions and direct messages), Facebook Pages (visitor posts, and comments and replies on your Page posts), Instagram Business profiles, and LinkedIn profiles.

To learn more about assignments and tags, see Automate assignments and tags.

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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

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.

The Team Performance view in Analytics helps you measure the effectiveness of interactions with customers and prospects on Facebook and Twitter. By reviewing work volume and resolution speed for individual teams and members, you can also gauge productivity and collect information for future social strategy goals at various locations. For more on Analytics for teams, see Track your team's performance.

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.