How Wawa gained 2.6M social media followers

LAS VEGAS — Wawa has stepped up its social media technique lately, and within the course of has gained 2.6 million followers and a couple of.5 million month-to-month engagements throughout all of its platforms.

The corporate has gotten there by providing a variety of lighthearted content material on its numerous channels, together with TikTok and Instagram. It’s run a video collection that includes two beefcakes handing out $100 reward playing cards to advertise its annual HoagieFest, and featured movies teasing drink specials aligned to consumers’ astrological indicators.

One publish commiserating with individuals who have moved to a spot with out a Wawa retailer garnered greater than 4,000 likes.

In line with Ariel Norwood, senior director of promoting engagement with Bounteous, the advertising and marketing firm that manages Wawa’s social media technique, the comfort retailer chain is trying to drive consciousness and loyalty by assembly younger digitally savvy consumers on their phrases and by channeling their enthusiasm for the model.

“Our shoppers get engaged in Wawa, they get married in Wawa, they’ve particular photoshoots in Wawa. … And as you’ll be able to think about, that is nice for social media,” she stated throughout an academic session on the NACS Present on Sunday.

Hearts out to all those that moved away from a Wawa

— Wawa (@Wawa) August 17, 2022

Wawa’s social media staff tries to create content material that falls into three classes: relatable content material, instructional content material and content material that gives incentives and promotions. One standard giveaway publish requested consumers to enter for an opportunity to win a summer season highway journey getaway, with all provisions offered by Wawa. The three-part video matching drinks to folks’s astrological indicators, in the meantime, prompted folks to repeat those self same orders in shops, Norwood stated. 

The social media staff usually makes scrappy, on-the-fly content material that includes expertise that’s shut at hand — like a Bounteous social media supervisor, who appeared in a single latest standard video.

“We have a tendency to make use of individuals who work for us usually because the face of the model in social media as a result of it’s actually powerful to trace down fashions,” she stated.

The staff additionally takes care to schedule loads of content material prematurely and to construct metadata into every publish to allow them to observe the recognition of varied matters and sorts of posts over time.

Just a few campaigns have managed to considerably transfer the needle on Wawa’s social following. Wawa signed up for a beta model of TikTok advertisements for manufacturers, funneled a few of its hottest social content material into this system and over a yr’s time noticed the variety of followers enhance greater than 1,800%. The chain at the moment has greater than 500,000 followers on the favored platform.

This summer season, to have a good time the return of its HoagieFest, which provides offers on the favored sandwich in shops, Wawa created 4,000 NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and gave them away to staff and consumers. The transfer grew Wawa’s social media following by 75,000 in a single month.

Norwood, who used to handle social media accounts for Entire Meals Market, inspired attendees to consider what units their model aside, and what shopper need it could actually fulfill, as a part of crafting a social media technique. Develop an interesting, distinctive voice that displays the model and is approachable to digitally savvy shoppers, and ensure to measure outcomes with the intention to additional hone content material and inform the enterprise technique.

She really useful operators new to social media concentrate on getting one channel proper, after which scale up from there. She pressured that c-store operators ought to focus extra on partaking customers than on increase followers.

“I might argue {that a} model with a extremely engaged fanbase with 50,000 followers has a extremely sturdy social media program, even when they do not have a big following,” she stated.