Constrain the format and leave the content alone. Specify the logo, the colors, the two or three things nobody may ever post, and stop there. Guidelines that dictate what each location says produce approval queues, and approval queues produce silence. The goal is not compliance. It is locations that still post.
Every brand guidelines document I have been handed by a multi-location client has been too long and enforced too little. Those two facts are the same fact.
Why do most guidelines fail?
Because they were written to prevent embarrassment rather than to enable posting.
A guidelines document usually gets written after something went wrong. Someone posted something off-key, it was noticed, and the response was a rulebook. That origin shows in the result: it is defensive, exhaustive and organized around what must not happen.
The problem is that the cost of a rule is paid every single time someone posts, and the benefit is paid only on the rare occasion someone would have made a mistake. Multiply a five-minute rule check across forty locations posting weekly and you have spent a great deal to prevent something that happens twice a year.
The failure mode is not rebellion. It is that posting quietly stops being worth the effort, and nobody notices for a quarter because there is no complaint when a location goes silent.
What should a guidelines document actually contain?
Four things, and it should fit on two pages.
- The visual constants. Which logo file, which colors, which two or three fonts. These are the things that make forty accounts look like one brand from a distance, and they cost nothing to follow because they are supplied rather than remembered.
- The never list. The small number of genuinely prohibited things, stated concretely. Not "be professional". Specific items: claims about the product that are not true, pricing that undercuts the system, anything discriminatory, customers' faces without permission, competitor names.
- The voice, in examples. Three posts that are right and three that are wrong, with a sentence on why. People pattern-match far better than they follow adjectives, and "friendly but professional" means nothing operationally.
- Who to ask. One name, one channel, and a promise about response time. Most guideline breaches are questions that never got asked because asking was awkward.
Everything else you were going to include belongs in the asset library, not the rules.
What should not be in it?
Anything that requires a decision from head office before a location can post.
The single most damaging line in most franchise guidelines is a requirement to submit posts for approval. It sounds prudent. In practice it introduces a delay between having something to say and being able to say it, and local social is almost entirely made of things that are only interesting today.
A location manager who has to wait two days will post the thing anyway on the first occasion, wait on the second, and stop trying by the fourth. What you get is not safer content. It is no content, plus a marketing team that believes the locations are disengaged.
Also worth cutting: prescribed posting frequency, which locations will fail and then feel bad about; mandated hashtags, which do very little; and required captions, which produce forty identical posts and forfeit the only advantage a local account has.
How do you enforce anything without approvals?
Monitor after, act rarely, and make the right thing the easiest thing.
Post-publication monitoring works because the actual risk is small and recoverable. Someone reviews the location accounts weekly, which takes under an hour for forty locations, and picks up on anything genuinely off. In the overwhelming majority of cases the correct response is a friendly message, not a process change.
Enforcement should be reserved for the never list, and the never list should be short enough that a breach is obviously a breach. Vague standards are unenforceable, which is why exhaustive guidelines paradoxically end up enforcing nothing.
The bigger lever is not enforcement at all. It is supply. A location posting off-brand photos usually has no on-brand photos available. Most compliance problems are asset problems, and they are solved by giving people something better to use rather than telling them what not to do.
What does the asset library need?
Enough that the right choice takes less effort than the wrong one.
Locations need photography they can actually use, meaning images of the real thing rather than stock. They need templates sized for the formats they post in, already branded, with editable slots. They need the logo in the variants that come up in practice, including on dark backgrounds and cropped square.
And they need it where they already are. An asset portal with a separate login is a portal nobody opens. A shared folder on the phone, or assets sent monthly in the channel the locations already use, gets used.
The test is simple: how many taps between a location manager deciding to post and having a branded asset in hand? If the answer is more than about three, the library is decorative.
How much local freedom is right?
More than feels comfortable, because the local voice is the whole point.
A location account exists to be local. If every post could have come from head office, you have built an expensive way to duplicate the brand account, and you would be better off running one account and putting the effort into the Google Business Profile for each site.
The three-tier system I set out in the multi-location pillar applies here: brand content produced centrally, adaptable templates with local slots, and purely local posts. Guidelines should govern the first tier tightly, the second lightly, and the third almost not at all beyond the never list.
The instinct to tighten the third tier is strong and wrong. That tier is where the credibility comes from, because it is unmistakably real, and realness does not survive editing by committee.
What about tone across very different locations?
Accept that it will vary, and decide how much variance is acceptable in advance.
A franchise operating in a college town and a retirement community should not sound identical, and forcing them to means one of them sounds wrong to its actual customers. The brand constant should be the visual identity and the values, not the register.
What is worth standardizing is the response to problems: how a complaint is answered, how a review is handled, what happens when something goes wrong publicly. That is where inconsistency does real damage, and it is where locations most want guidance anyway.
Give them a short script for the difficult things and freedom on the easy ones. Most guidelines do the reverse.
What I see in guideline documents
Two patterns, and both are symptoms of the same misdiagnosis.
The first is length. Forty pages covering scenarios that have never occurred, which means the parts that matter are buried and nobody reads any of it. Length is not thoroughness; it is a failure to decide what matters.
The second is an approval workflow that everyone describes as necessary and nobody can point to a case for. Ask when it last caught something. The answer is usually a story from several years ago, or nothing.
Meanwhile the never list, which is the part that would genuinely help, is either missing or written in language too vague to act on.
What to do on Monday
Open your current guidelines and find the never list. If there is not one, or if it says something like "maintain professionalism", write a real one this week. Five to eight concrete items, each one a thing you would actually act on.
Then find every step that stands between a location deciding to post and the post going live. Remove the ones that exist to prevent something that has not happened.
Then ask how many locations posted last month. That number tells you whether your guidelines are working, and it is the only number that does.
FAQ
How do you keep multiple locations consistent on social media? Constrain format rather than content. Specify the logo, colors and fonts, define a short list of genuinely prohibited things, and leave what each location says to that location. Consistency in look is achievable; consistency in voice usually costs you posting altogether.
Should franchisees get their social posts approved? Almost never. Approval delays kill local posting, because local content is mostly things that are only interesting on the day. Monitor after publication instead, which takes about an hour a week for forty locations.
What should be in social media brand guidelines? Visual constants, a short concrete list of things nobody may post, the voice shown through right and wrong examples, and one named person to ask. Two pages is usually enough.
How do you stop locations posting off-brand content? Give them better assets. Most off-brand posting is someone with no usable images doing their best. If the on-brand option takes more than about three taps to reach, it will not get used.
Should every location sound the same? No. Locations serving different communities should sound different, and forcing a single register makes one of them sound wrong to its own customers. Standardize the visual identity and the handling of complaints, not the tone.
About the author
Adam Palmer is President of Inertia Digital Marketing, the agency behind Social Fonts. He has spent 15 years running paid and organic campaigns for clients ranging from single-location small businesses to national franchise networks, and has managed over $50 million in paid digital spend.