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Working at a company that does this stuff for restaurants and franchises, and holy shit you’ve hit the exact wall every multi-location brand runs into. Your social team creating content for 50+ locations is never going to work, no matter how good your templates are.
The fundamental problem is you’re thinking about this backwards. Instead of your team creating content and pushing it down to locations, you need your locations creating content and pushing it up to you. The best performing franchise content comes from actual customers and staff at each location, not from corporate trying to guess what works locally.
Our clients stopped trying to create everything centrally once they realized authentic customer content performs way better than staged corporate stuff. When someone posts about their experience at your downtown location vs your suburban spot, that content is automatically localized and way more believable than anything your team could produce.
Here’s what actually scales: get each location collecting customer content through QR codes or simple upload systems. Customers create the local menu shots, the authentic reactions, the real moments that corporate could never replicate. Then you have a system that automatically turns that raw customer content into branded videos for each location’s social accounts.
For staff highlights and store-specific promos, train your location managers to capture quick content using their phones. Give them simple guidelines, not complex production requirements. A 30-second video of staff explaining a local promotion will outperform any polished corporate video every time.
The franchises crushing it right now are the ones who stopped trying to control every piece of content and started empowering their locations to capture authentic moments. Automation handles the heavy lifting of turning raw content into branded posts, but the creativity and local relevance comes from the actual people at each location.
Stop drowning in edits and start collecting real customer experiences instead.
