Building Social Media Governance at Scale

The Problem

When I joined U.S. Dermatology Partners, social media existed, but not as a program. There were corporate Facebook and Twitter profiles for the USDP brand, as well as a scattering of individual office Facebook pages. Some of those account logins were known; some weren't. There was no consistent branding or naming across profiles, and no platform or system to manage it centrally. With about 40 locations in the organization at the time, only a handful were represented on social media at all.

The lack of a system created its own problems. Because there was no management platform, posting anywhere required logging into each account individually, so posting was inconsistent. Some offices posted off-brand content on their own. Most offices that had a profile weren't posting at all. And many locations had no social presence to manage in the first place.

The Solution

I built the company's first real social media governance model: a centralized system for content, access, and brand voice that could scale as the company continued to add locations.

Centralizing the Program

I researched and selected a social media management platform, Hootsuite initially and later Sprout Social after a pricing change, to centralize access and posting across every office instead of logging into each profile separately. For locations with no social presence, we created one. For the roughly 25 to 30 of the original 40 locations that already had some kind of profile, we brought them into the managed system.

Content and Approval Workflow

My team produced daily, on-brand content, planned up to a month in advance, for every office's profile. In the early stages, I wrote the content and built the graphics myself, with the CMO approving them. As the team grew, a social media coordinator took over writing and creating content in line with a set of brand voice guidelines, and I became the approver. For offices that wanted more direct involvement, I worked with them individually: they'd bring me photos or video, usually around a local event like an open house or a health fair, and we'd build posts specific to their office and submit them through the same approval process. My team also owned monitoring and responding to comments and direct messages across every profile.

Growing the Team to Match the Program

I inherited a graphic designer already on the team. As the program grew, I personally interviewed and selected both the social media coordinator and a copywriter to support content production, and I managed the work of another content creator who joined the team through the CMO. Marketing assistants were vetted collaboratively by the team, with final hiring decisions made by the CMO. For roughly five of my seven years in the role, I was hands-on across both execution and strategy for our social program. In the final two years, as the social media coordinator took on more of the content production, my role shifted toward oversight and strategic direction.

Results

The social audience grew 840% over six years. That growth came from a few things working together: consistent daily content gave people an actual reason to follow a page that used to sit dormant, paid campaigns drove local page follows in each market, and every time a new location came online, we repeated the same playbook of setting up its profile, feeding it daily content, and promoting it. Some of that growth also reflects the company's expansion itself, from 40 locations to 108 over the same period, and I want to be direct about that rather than credit the governance model alone for every point of it. What the model did was ensure that the growth in the number of locations actually translated into a real, consistently managed social presence in every market, rather than leaving new offices to start from scratch, as most of the original 40 had.

The program's impact was also recognized internally: after implementing this system, I received the company's Regional Rockstar award, a monthly recognition given to one person from each of USDP's five regions for their contributions to the organization.