Birdeye makes social media management for multi-location easy 

Have you ever wondered why multi-location businesses have different social media accounts? 

Our recent webinar, ‘Local social: How to manage social media across locations,’ for Birdeye VIEW 2023, unveils the real-life success story of Valley Veterinary Care’s social media reputation management. It explores how they balanced corporate consistency with local authenticity. 

Birdeye View 2023 welcomed 50 thought-leaders from leading companies, including Microsoft and Google, and customer experience strategist and author Jay Baer. Watch it on demand today. 

Managing 24 locations, each with its vibe and all rocking 75 different social media accounts, is not easy. It’s like managing a bustling digital zoo, but as Meghan Bingham, Senior Operations Manager at Valley Veterinary Care, points out:

“It’s so important for each of our practices to share their personalities so they can keep that authentic local presence. But Birdeye Social allows us to post across locations while connecting with our communities.“

This blog delves deeper into a candid conversation between Meghan and Rebecca Colwell, VP of Product & Customer Marketing at Birdeye. During the discussion, Meghan shares the nuances of managing 75 distinct social media accounts and why the brand is proud of its well-earned reputation. 

Key takeaways from the ‘Local social: How to manage social across locations’ session

• Valley Veterinary Care has 75 unique social accounts for each of its 24 locations to maintain an authentic local voice.
• The corporate marketing team creates content using employee/client submissions. 
• Maintaining unique local voices despite the central corporate marketing team is easier with Birdeye’s Social media management platform.
• Measuring success goes beyond vanity metrics like likes/shares. We need to look at overall reach, followers, and engagement.
• How Valley Veterinary Care was amazed by Birdeye’s AI in social media management capabilities.
• A unified platform allows scheduling in bulk across accounts. 
• BirdAI can auto-generate posts from prompts, suggest variations, add hashtags, and find images. It’s a huge time saver.
• Most engaging content is personal (staff, pets) or prompts for users to share photos. Balancing different types of content is key.
• With 75+ accounts, this content generation assistance will allow more localization and customization.

Local social – How to manage social across locations: Session transcript

Rebecca Caldwell: Hello and welcome to ‘Local Social: How to Manage Social Across Locations.’ My name is Rebecca Caldwell, and I will be your Birdeye guide during this session. 

Today, Meghan Bingham, Senior Operations Manager at Valley Veterinary Care, a group of 24 emergency vet hospitals and wellness clinics across Texas, Colorado, and California, joins. Welcome, Meghan!

Meghan Bingham: Thank you so much for including me today. I’m excited to share our social media purrs and grrrs with everyone.

Rebecca: That’s so great. We’re excited to have you. So, Meghan, I understand that you started in vet care as a kennel technician and then worked up to your current role as Senior Operations Manager. Super impressive! 

What do you enjoy most about the vet care industry and your current role?

Meghan: Goodness, I love it so much about veterinary medicine. I get to spend every day trying to make things better for people and their pets. Checking all those boxes, I’m more removed in this position than I was, getting to play with puppies and kittens daily. 

But really, I think that now I am setting up their practices for success, which is almost as rewarding. And I just love being able to help people and their pets and watch them grow together. I love that.

Rebecca: That’s wonderful. One of the things I find most impressive about you and your role is handling the local social media and driving awareness and engagement within the communities across the 25 locations. 

Can you tell us more about how you’re managing social? Do you have a single location or individual accounts for each location?

Meghan: It’s a great question. We have unique social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and some X(formerly Twitter) for each of our 24 locations. So, across the organization, we have at least 75 unique social accounts where we try to publish content and engage with local audiences with an authentic voice for each of our practices.

Rebecca: Wow! That’s a lot of social profiles! So why did you decide to take that approach and have a unique account for each location?

Meghan: I think it’s so important for each of our practices to be able to keep and share their personalities. They’re each unique in their way. They have an authentic local presence, which is important. And they each have a different relationship with their community. So, we can’t always copy and paste the same content across the locations and expect it to connect with our customers. 

You know, people in California are different from those in Texas. Emergency clinics are different than general wellness clinics (GWCs). So you can tell, like with these two pictures here, there’s a difference between the GWCs and the emergency practices. 

Our customers think of us as their other family doctors. You know, they stick with us for multiple generations, the lifetime of a pet. And so our posts need to reflect those connections.

Plus, it just doesn’t feel as authentic when things look too fancy or like a corporate entity generated them. And I think our clients are smart enough to know when ads or marketing are masquerading as social media posts. 

So we try to keep the voice and the personalized pictures and the, you know, quotes from clients and the cute little things that make us unique in the community.

Curious about unlocking the full potential of social media? Explore Birdeye's pricing page to discover how affordable social media management can be!

Rebecca: This is impressive! Do social media managers at each location provide content, or is this happening at the corporate level?

Meghan: Everything for us is managed at the corporate level. We have an amazing marketing team at the home office that oversees our individual social media accounts. When we were smaller, one or two practices, three or four, we tried giving the local practices control. We found it was a little difficult to maintain our message and ensure that people stayed on point. Because you know, brand perception is everything, right? 

People are extremely passionate about their pets, and we know how things can be misinterpreted online and quickly blown out of proportion on social media. We wanted to ensure that we had that control and consistency. By keeping our messaging at the corporate level, we can ensure consistency and avoid potential pitfalls.

It was also challenging to get buy-in and engagement from the local practices. You know, they’re super busy, they’re focused on patient care and social media sometimes gets put on the back burner. So, we found that managing it all centrally was the best way to ensure our social media publishing is consistent and high-quality content across the board.

Rebecca: That makes sense.  With your lean team managing all this, how are you doing it? What processes and systems are you using to execute your social media strategy?

Meghan: We have a few things that we do. We leverage technology to our advantage. We have a content management system that allows us to schedule posts in advance, but it also allows us to localize the content for each location. 

“As we’ve grown from one practice to 24, we’ve had to streamline for more consistency and efficiency. We heavily depend on Birdeye Social, especially the social media calendar.”

Meghan Bingham, Senior Operations Manager at Valley Veterinary Care

We schedule out our content in advance, which is super helpful. Birdeye has been an excellent source of user-generated social content for our Friday testimonials. 

The AI-recommended responses are helpful when we’ve run out of ways to thank you. The dashboard also allows us to monitor and respond promptly to online reviews, a game-changer. It helps us celebrate wins with our staff and address any issues promptly.

We can use location-specific keywords, tag local events, and highlight local team members and pets. We also have a team of social media specialists trained to understand each community’s nuances. 

They work closely with the local practice managers to identify what’s happening in their area, their patients’ interests, and what content would resonate with them. 

We also encourage our local teams to share their photos and videos with us. You know, they’re the ones who are on the front lines. They’re the ones who know their patients best. So, we want to amplify their voices and let them shine through on social media.

Rebecca: That’s great to hear. I’m glad Birdeye has been so beneficial for you. Now, I understand you had early access to some AI-driven social features. What were your impressions?

Meghan: AI is everywhere, and there’s both good and bad. We’re excited to help where we can get it. With 24 practices, repeatedly developing new ways to say the same things takes time. AI tools will help us appear more genuine in our responses, adding variety to our content. 

I played around with the AI features and was super impressed. I put in five words, and AI expanded my post beautifully. The suggested hashtags were relevant, and the AI image engine provided many options quickly. I’m beyond impressed and excited about what this means for us.

Meghan Bingham, Senior Operations Manager at Valley Veterinary Care

Rebecca: That’s a great approach. And how do you measure the success of your social media efforts across 24 locations? Do you have a single set of metrics that you use, or is it more customized to each location?

Meghan: We have a mix of both. We have some key performance indicators that we track across all of our locations, such as engagement, social media reach, follower growth, sentiment analysis, and website traffic. 

But we also look at individual location performance and compare it to their historical data and local competitors. This allows us to track progress and adjust as needed for each location. And you know, we’re always looking for new ways to measure success. 

In addition to engagement, we look at the number of appointments scheduled through social media. Birdeye helps us track these metrics, clearly showing our social media impact.

Rebecca: That’s exciting! You have a sophisticated and data-driven approach to managing social media across multiple locations.

Meghan: Thank you! We’re always learning and adapting, but we’ve found a system that works for us. It’s all about striking that balance between consistency and authenticity and using data to inform our decisions but not letting it dictate everything we do.

Rebecca: Well, it’s working. It’s always great to tie social media efforts back to tangible results. You have a thriving social media presence and connect meaningfully with your communities. Thanks so much for sharing your insights with us today, Meghan!

Meghan: Thank you so much for having me! I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share our story.
Rebecca: And to our audience, if you have any questions for Meghan, please drop them in the chat now. We’ll be happy to answer them as we go.

Use Birdeye Social to streamline your social media management easily 

Birdeye VIEW 2023 was a first-of-its-kind digital user conference. We introduced BirdAI, enabling multi-location businesses to produce content, refine messaging, decipher customer data, and make strategic decisions faster than ever.

The two-day event drew 3,500+ tech enthusiasts from over 750 businesses and 50+ speakers who shared how AI is shaping our future and helping companies manage social across locations. 

Want to relive the best moments from Birdeye View 2023? 

Click on the banner below to watch all the sessions on-demand!