Engage121 lets brands spy on their franchise locations

Engage121, a company that has developed a social media monitoring and engagement tool, is attempting to differentiate itself from all the competing social media monitoring companies by launching a service specially designed for national brands with local franchises.

The new social application has been dubbed “Engage121: Enterprise” and is meant to allow national brands to easily keep an eye on their franchise owners social media activity through measuring and analytics, which gets as granular as seeing activity by location.

The tool also lets those brands create templates for their franchisers — i.e., people who operate local stores with the branding of big chains (for example Curves), but don’t actually work for the brand itself — to use on their individual social media channels, like Facebook and Twitter. Those templates can be helpful to a franchise owner who is less knowledgable of the social media space and needs help posting content or engaging with customers. For example, a national brand can distribute a Twitter update (coupon, special message, etc) through its service and the franchise owners then have the option of approving it to be posted or not.

Several other companies specifically target companies with franchises and multiple locations, and they offer similar features, including Valuevine and Expion. Engage121’s 10 plus years of experience might be its main differentiator. Though big name players in the general social media monitoring and engagement space, such as Radian6 and Visible Technologies, are likely to include features for franchises eventually.

The company is based in Norwalk, CT and was founded in 1997.