Social Media Guidelines
Jason Zelinski, vice president of North American Retail, Convenience at NielsenIQ, offers these simple guidelines for building an optimal social media strategy:
- Know Your Audience: Understand which social media platforms your key customers prefer and start there.
- Stay True to Your Brand: Emphasize what you’re known for — whether it’s frozen drinks, a pizza program, coffee or customer service. “Consistently reinforce these messages,” he said.
- Ease of Engagement: Make it simple for customers to engage with your brand. Ensure that once they find you on social media, it’s easy to visit or buy from your store.
- Consistency With In-Store Experience: Ensure that your stores can back up your social media messages. “The internet can be fickle; if you claim to have the cleanest bathrooms, they better be spotless. One negative review with a photo can undo your social media efforts,” he emphasized.
- Effective Management: Have the right team managing your social media accounts. They should respond to customers in a way that reflects your brand values.
“However, it’s also important that c-stores experiment with content that can establish them as trend creators,” Kristobak explained. “It’s an arduous process that takes significant time, especially when following trends tend to deliver bigger social results more immediately. But the benefits of following trends eventually plateaus when you don’t commit to also becoming a trend driver.”
While what is popular today could be considered cringe tomorrow, short-form videos like TikToks and Instagram Reels are what’s hot right now. The good news is hat these platforms make it easy to capture videos, edit them and add effects such as music.
“It’s important to remember videos don’t necessarily need to be super high-quality productions,” Harbeck noted. “It could be a video of something as simple as preparing a food order for a customer. With the editing tools that TikTok and Instagram Reels provide, they can easily help you create a polish finished product.”
If retailers are interested in integrating short-form videos into their social media marketing strategy, Harbeck recommends setting a goal of posting one video a week. Once posting once a week becomes a part of a normal workflow, retailers can start creating more videos, she said.
Another venue to explore is influencers. This kind of campaign allows an influencer to engage with a brand’s audience by posting to the company’s account, or hosting contests or giveaways in collaboration with the brand to increase engagement and visibility.
“If using influencers, ensure they are well-vetted and truly represent your brand values,” cautioned Jason Zelinski, vice president of North American Retail, Convenience at NielsenIQ.
Using AI to Get Started
Because social media is such a crowded space, c-store operators need to be strategic with their messaging. An opportunity to help guide their approach is using artificial intelligence (AI), Harbeck pointed out. Tools like Claude, ChatGPT or CoPilot allow users to do a deep analysis on their online presence and to identify themes. These themes can drive message that resonates with those following retailers on their social media pages.
