How do you scale social content creation across dozens of franchise locations?

[oral_herpes]

I’ve been there, tried juggling agencies, freelancers, and templates, but it always felt like we were just patching holes. What worked for us was switching to reelscale. It automates a lot of the heavy lifting for Reels/TikToks while still letting you customize for each location, so we can crank out localized content for dozens of outlets without burning out the team. Quality’s been way more consistent too.

[mattdaymoondev]

We built Post for Me to help with scaling organic outreach. Our API lets you post and schedule content to an unlimited number of accounts, while easily customizing the content for each of those accounts.

[ladytealscurios]

I feel like Barnes and Noble stores do a good job of this, especially on TikTok. Honestly, each location should be doing their own social media and that should be included in the location’s marketing budget. Specifically for social media the posts are going to be deprioritized if they are duplicate posts anyways. You could easily create a content plan for each franchise to follow that is like a library of videos for them to reproduce with their own team.

[timhill22]

I don’t think there’s an easy answer here because humans are involved and localization is almostttt impossible to do centralized. The way I’ve handled it in the past is to build content creation into the KPIs of venue managers and build this up as a capability across the whole company. It is slow going but I think its the best way so that you develop distributed capabilities overtime for authentic content creation that works at each location. Putting in place dedicated Slack channel for the venue managers, fortnightly all-in calls, monthly creator collabs, style guides, internal leaderboards are all things that can help too.

[Flamel_AI]

It’s a big balance of providing useful tempaltes/assets and enabling each location to effectively build their own content. And honestly more organic (less nationally produced and perfect to brand) content typically performs better at an individual franchise location.

[IluminEdu]

This is such a tricky balance. I’ve seen brands get stuck between “everything looks polished but generic” vs. “everything looks authentic but inconsistent.” The systems that seem to work are a mix of centralized templates (so the look/feel stays on brand) + local teams filling in the personal touches (staff, specials, events). That way your core content scales, and the regional flavor still comes through. Otherwise, you’ll drown trying to custom-create for 50+ locations yourself.

[ScaleSocial]

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.