Franchise Marketing Focus Reading »

SMO (Social Media Optimization) for Franchise Marketing

The advent of Web 2.0 bought with it the social media revolution. Franchises are positioned to take advantage of their size and scalability in this new web space. By creating a collaboration tool for internal communication or an internal wiki, online franchisors can benefit from improved communication channels with their franchisees.

The benefits of leveraging an internal wiki as a part of social media optimization are multifold. It creates a forum, which enables to scale ongoing email conversations within the franchise network more efficiently. This forum will also aid in syncing up training programs as it facilitates collaboration. This further aids in sharing strategy and aggregating best practices. This, consequently, will help a franchisor to make the training more self-organizing and self-directed.

Components of Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization, like traditional marketing, is an intricate task, which requires a lot of research, assessment and reassessment. It also entails utilizing multiple platforms for maximizing the probability of success. Broadly, social media optimization and marketing strategies can be categorized into:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This encompasses adopting an ingenious set of techniques for driving a franchise’s website to attain top search engine rankings. Content, on websites and blogs of the franchise, is the most important component of SEO.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): This entails capitalizing social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to embed business as well as personal messages. This platform enables to foster relationships with new and existing clients and due to this franchises are enjoying heavy income.

Viral Marketing: This is the online marketing of a franchise equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising. Successful viral advertising requires create a buzz in the pertinent community. Affiliate marketing is the most commonly used viral marketing strategy for a franchise.

Final words: Franchises are using excellent strategy of social media optimization to attract users. If a franchise uses it efficiently then it is the most economical way to reach users of different regions and penetrate global markets to offer a differentiated and compelling value proposition. Mostly franchisees and franchisors heavily relying on social media for marketing and advertising their products and no doubt franchises are quite happy with the performance of social media during the global economic recession.