Sheetz is a kicked-up convenience store with over 435 locations across a six-state footprint throughout the East Coast and Midwest. Known for its Made-to-Order food and drinks, Sheetz offers a huge variety of sandwiches, subs, wings, salads, appetizers and more available 24/7 along with their convenience items and high quality gasoline. Sheetz has a large contingency of diehard fans and advocates (known as Sheetz Freakz), but many were not actively engaging in the Facebook conversation. Others were unaware altogether that Sheetz was on Facebook. In 2012, we made it a focal point of the social media strategy to provide Sheetz Freakz with a brand voice and meaningful content that would allow them to Feel The Love on Facebook. Although small in size compared to national brands, we aimed to grow the Sheetz Facebook presence in order to make them a main player in the social media convenience store world. Sheetz approached 2012 with goals of establishing Facebook as the hub of their social media efforts in order to leverage their diehard fans and develop additional brand advocates. Our strategy began with actively listening to what fans were currently talking about, what they wanted from a brand in social media, and discovering how Sheetz fit in to their lifestyle. We learned that our fans were highly vocal about sharing their opinions on Sheetz business endeavors and were in tune with pop culture. We crafted a strategy that focused our messaging on five key pillars: brand culture, trending topics, fan generated content, promos, and news. We started conversations that leveraged trending memes and crowd sourced the opinions of our fans on business decisions (giving them the opportunity to choose what billboards we would run). Contests, such as the “Ultimate M•T•O Creation", rewarded fans with free food for sharing their crazy customized meal recommendations. Our social media team worked to keep these conversations going through 24/7 monitoring and management within the brand voice. Scheduled cover photo redesigns as well as specific Facebook videos and artwork kept the page fresh and fans coming back. Our Shout Out Facebook app received hundreds of video submissions from Sheetz Freakz eager to share their love of the brand with others. Throughout 2012, Sheetz Freakz were liking, sharing, commenting, and submitting content of their own like never before. The Results The “28 Days People Talking About This" measure of engagement skyrocketed by 1,043% in 2012. Facebook fans increased from 183,568 on January 1, 2012 to 742,419 on December 31, 2012 (an increase of 304%). More than 325 videos from fans were submitted declaring their love for Sheetz as part of our Sheetz Shout Out Facebook campaign. Our Facebook ad campaign amassed more than 474 million impressions and 464,600 clicks. Our wildly successful Facebook ad campaign caught the eye of Facebook who in turn asked to publish a case study highlighting our work. Sheetz was recognized by Convenience Store Decisions Magazine as a leader in social media among convenience stores and was named for “Best encouraging conversation instead of broadcasting".
