Devising Social Strategy For A Business With Multiple Locations

Devising a social media strategy for a business with multiple locations can be a difficult process. What if you are a store, salon, or  restaurant with several locations?  Often it's hard to determine how many accounts to create, which networks to create them on, or how to reach their target audience in each separate location. Lucky for us, Tender Greens has done a great job tackling this problem and provides some great examples for us to look at in a quick case study. Take a look after the jump to read 3 easy steps to building a social strategy for your multi-location business.


Step 1: Link all Your Social Media Accounts to Your Home Page
From a quick look at the Tender Greens homepage, you can find all of their social media icons clearly linked to their accounts so customers can easily access them. This is good practice for all businesses to tie their social media properties to the home page. This creates a digital web through which if any users find the business on one network, they can easily find it on another, thus, your Facebook fans become your Twitter followers and vice versa. We can see from the homepage that Tender Greens has a Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, and Tumblr account.

Step 2: Devise Your Strategy For Each Individual Account 
No two social media networks are the same. Each has its different benefits, and each serves its own purpose. It's important when devising a strategy for your business that you understand how each network works in order to construct your individual plans for each account.

In Tender Greens case, they elected to have one account on each platform, rather than multiple accounts for their various locations. In order to differentiate between their different locations, they utilized individual aspects of each network to their advantage.

Step 3: Utilize Hashtags

#Hashtags are the magical glue on Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, that group different topics together, and in this case study, the key to balancing social media for Tender Green's various locations. Tender Greens could have gone crazy creating a different Twitter account for each of their restaurants, but instead they do the perfect job of using hashtags to brilliantly differentiate between each of their locations. On Twitter, they've created a customized background illustrating the hashtag that refers to each of their individual restaurants.

Close up look at Tender Green's Hashtags,
as illustrated on their Twitter  background.

By creating a different hashtag for each location, Tender Greens can specify which messages refer to which of their locations.  For example, the tweet below alerts their followers to the dinner special at their Irvine location.

And the following tweet shows a picture of a menu item at their Walnut Creek location.

Since these hashtags work on Pinterest and Instagram as well, they serve across those social media accounts. In the above tweet, you can see they used an Instagram picture, cross-promoting their menu item on both platforms.

Yum! A Tender Greens Instagram photo they cross promoted on their Twitter account.

On Pinterest, Tender Greens again opted to keep one main account, and create a board dedicated to their different locations. Using the same hashtags, they can differentiate each pin they post by its location.

Tender Greens has one board dedicated to their
different restaurant locations

They differentiate their locations using
the same hashtags as Twitter.

Irvine hashtag used by Tender Greens
on Pinterest

Overall, Tender Greens simplified what could be a complicated issue when juggling multiple business locations. By creating hashtags that are easy to understand (due to their key on their Twitter profile) they've created an efficient social media strategy, reducing resources and eliminating the need for multiple accounts.

What suggestions do you have for organizing social media strategies for businesses with multiple locations? Please feel free to tell me in the comments section!