Managing social media for multiple pub and restaurant locations

To manage social media for multiple restaurant locations, give each venue its own Instagram, Facebook and Google Business Profile, run them from one shared content calendar with slots for local posts, and agree in writing who drafts, who approves and who can publish. Group brand rules keep everything consistent. Site managers add the local detail that gets people through the door.

#Should each venue have its own social media accounts?

For most groups, yes. People follow the place they go to, and the place they go to has its own quiz night and its own crowd on a Friday. A single brand feed carrying events for five sites ends up being mostly irrelevant to everyone who reads it.

One brand account can still work if your sites share a name, a menu and nearly all their offers, and sit close enough together that a post about one is useful to followers of the others. Some groups run both: a brand account for the big moments and an account per venue for everything local. That's more accounts to keep alive, so only do it if each site has someone who'll post.

Google is less flexible. Each location gets its own Business Profile, and Google's guidelines for representing your business say "Do not create more than one page for each location of your business". Under chains and brands they also say all locations must have the same name, unless the name genuinely varies on the signs, website and stationery from one site to the next. If you've got 10 or more locations of the same business, Google lets you verify them in bulk. Our Google Business Profile guide covers setting each one up properly.

For handles, pick one pattern and use it everywhere, such as the brand name followed by the area. Guests searching for "your name plus the town" should find the right venue first time.

#Who should be allowed to post for each venue?

Everyone who posts should have their own login with only the access they need. Shared passwords are how a former bartender ends up still able to post as you six months after they left.

Meta Business Suite handles this through a business portfolio, which brings your Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts together in one place. Meta's permissions guide describes two levels. Full control is the highest. Partial access limits people to the assets or tasks they've been given, such as creating content, managing ads or responding to messages. You can also add someone with temporary access, which Meta sets at a minimum of 3 days and a maximum of 75, after which it's removed automatically. That's handy for a freelancer covering a few weeks.

When a manager leaves, removing their access goes on the same checklist as collecting their keys. Keep at least two people on full control, too, so you're never locked out of your own accounts because one person is on holiday or unreachable.

#How do you keep each venue sounding local?

Write one set of group brand rules, then give every site a short local sheet on top. The group rules cover how you talk, the words you never use, caption length, hashtags and the look of the graphics. The local sheet is half a page, written by the site manager:

• What locals call the area, and the landmarks people know
• The teams the pub shows, and the fixtures that fill it
• Regular events such as the quiz or the open mic night
• Quirks guests love, such as the fire, the dog or the hidden garden
• Staff who are happy to appear in photos

Here's the same group announcement written for two sites of a fictional group called The Lantern:

"Autumn menu from Thursday. Venison pie's £16.50, and the big window table is back on the booking system if you want it." (Headingley)

"Autumn menu from Thursday. The venison pie's £16.50 and goes nicely with a dog asleep under the table (Biscuit has tried it, Biscuit approves)." (Chapel Allerton)

Both carry the group's facts and price in the group's tone, and only the local detail changes. If you haven't nailed the group voice yet, start with our guide to finding your venue's brand voice, then write the local sheets.

#How do you plan content across several venues?

Use one shared calendar with group slots planned centrally and local slots filled by each site. The group lead plans the moments that apply everywhere: a new menu, Christmas party bookings, the bank holidays, a big tournament. Each site manager fills their local slots by a fixed deadline, say Thursday for the following week.

The split is up to you. I'd lean towards more local than group, because the local posts are the ones regulars stop scrolling for. Our 2027 hospitality marketing calendar lists the dates worth planning group posts around.

This is the shape we designed Venuesmith around: multiple locations, each with its own brand voice, logo and accounts, with every plan approved before anything goes out.

#How do approvals work across sites?

Decide in advance who signs off what, and write it down. Approvals across a group go wrong in two ways: everything waits for one busy person, or nobody checks anything. A simple split avoids both.

• Group posts get approved once, by the group lead, for every site at the same time
• Local posts get approved by the site manager, as long as they stay within the brand rules
• Anything with a price, an offer, a competition or a promotion on alcohol goes to whoever owns pricing and compliance
• Anything sensitive (a complaint, an incident, local news) goes to the group lead before it's posted or answered
• Each approver has a named deputy for holidays and days off

Then set a regular window, the same afternoon each week, when approvers go through everything due in the next seven days. Batching it is quicker than approving post by post as they trickle in, and it gives site managers a clear deadline.

#How do you keep branding consistent across venues?

Lock down the things guests see first and leave the words to the sites. In practice that means:

• One set of templates for graphics, with shared fonts and colours and a logo version for each venue
• The same profile photo style across every account, so they look related in a list of search results
• A bio format every site follows, for example the venue name and area, food hours, then the booking link
• A short photo guide (natural light and real dishes, never stock images)
• The same hashtag pattern, with the brand tag plus one or two local ones

If your tool lets you hold separate templates and brand settings per location, use them. It saves a site manager in a hurry from posting with another venue's logo.

#How do you report on social media across several venues?

Report the same handful of numbers for every venue each month and put them side by side. Totals for the whole group hide almost everything useful; a table with one row per site shows you straight away which one's flying and which one's gone quiet.

For Instagram, I'd track viewers, the share of viewers who don't already follow you, saves and shares, and taps on the website, call and directions buttons. Our guide to Instagram insights for restaurants explains what each of those means and gives you a 20-minute monthly routine to run per site. Add each venue's new Google reviews and average rating to the same sheet, and make sure every review gets an answer from someone who knows that site (our guide to responding to reviews has templates).

Share the sheet with your site managers every month. When one venue's numbers dip, the manager usually knows why before you do, whether that's roadworks outside or the quiz host leaving, and the conversation is more useful than the chart. If you're still choosing software to run all this, our comparison of social media scheduling tools for restaurants lists prices, trials and networks for the main options.