Village Vets tackles social media security and governance of 18 locations on SocioCommand

Veterinarians have an incredibly busy schedule - whether it is delivering litters of puppies, helping sick cats, or treating what most people consider their best friends - so taking time out of their busy days to post on social media isn’t always an option! 

Village Vets is an independent, Irish-based practice which opened in 1980 with two clinics. Over the last 43 years, it has grown to have eighteen locations across the country.  They want to instil confidence in their customers and showcase compassion, care, trust and understanding through their marketing platforms. Village Vets have an excellent reputation and their staff are hard-working and believe in a certain way of working with animals that is both kind and knowledgeable. 

Social media is extremely important to Village Vets - it allows them to showcase their values to local audiences and allows communities to better understand their practices and services. It puts a face to the name of their veterinary teams and lets communities create connections with both the staff and the fluffy animals they treat. 

Before joining SocioLocal, Village Vets had gone through a massive security breach on their Instagram account - and lost access to it completely. Their Marketing Manager had spent the previous 10 years building the Instagram account to over 4,000 followers and gaining loyal advocates online. Losing it was heartbreaking and ensuring that it never happened again was a key objective of the Village Vets marketing team coming into 2023. 

Prior to joining SocioCommand, each clinic had access to Facebook via the Meta Business Manager - however, not everyone had a Facebook profile so logins were shared and their security protocols were not sufficiently robust. Because of this, the key pain point that Village Vets was trying to overcome was a lack of social media security. 

We talked to Agnieszka Kolek, who manages the social media brand campaigns across Village Vets’ 18 locations, about how she does it, why they started with SocioCommand and what her favourite features of the platform are. 

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Kate (SocioLocal): How valuable is social media to Village Vets?

Agnieszka (Village Vets): It is extremely important to us. The offers that Village Vets creates get promoted on the website, through reception TV ads and printed on leaflets but it is mostly social media campaigns that get customers. It is easy to know that campaigns are working on social media because you can track where the booking links traffic comes from. 

Every month, we create campaigns for all of our locations; these include topics such as opening hours, services, educational and health awareness posts, special offers and out-of-hours options. Each clinic then posts at least one post per week - they get to post patient stories, behind the scenes and, of course, the cute, fluffy puppies and kittens visiting our practices and lots of great content that gets all of the engagement on our local pages. They get lots of likes and increase awareness of each of our business pages. Then customers get all of the important and necessary information about Village Vets services from our brand posts after they have engaged with the cute, fluffy local posts.  

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‍Kate: Since joining SocioCommand, have your security protocols improved?

Agnieszka: Yes, that was our favourite thing about SocioCommand. Security was a big concern for us when we joined. Now, each clinic has a login to SocioConnect and they don’t need to have access to Meta. If an employee leaves, we update the password for the clinic’s access to SocioConnect but they never have access to our Facebook or Instagram pages directly. They can’t delete a page, or post something on a page without our knowledge. It is much safer. 

We can now monitor what is happening on all of our pages prior to any content going up. Before SocioCommand, we wasted lots of time monitoring what was happening on all 18 pages on Facebook and Instagram. 

Kate: Yes, not only can a tool like SocioCommand ensure that you retain visibility and access to all branded social media assets but that store staff can have their access restricted to the SocioLocal tool so you can be confident if they leave you retain ownership of the page.

If you would like to read more about the governance and security challenges that brands can address by signing up for SocioCommand, take a look at our Challenges to Supporting Social Media for Franchisees blog from our CEO, Michael Nolan.

Agnieszka and the marketing team in Village Vets have done an excellent job in building back up the Instagram page over the last two years and ensuring a consistent balance of branded content and local content to keep users knowledgeable and engaged.

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