Wine Influencer: @thiswaywithtay

XChateau is a podcast about all things wine, from vine to your glass. We tackle the business of wine and keep you up to date with new and exciting developments in the wine industry.

In this episode, Robert Vernick and Peter Yeung interview Taylor Wilson (Instagram: @thiswaywithtay) about becoming a full-time wine influencer on Instagram from a career in real estate. Robert and Peter discuss how Taylor’s mother’s love of wine inspired her to learn more about it, wine education, building an 18,000+ IG following in one year, and how certain clothing choices can help engagement.

Other topics covered in this episode include:

Inspiration of wine love from Taylor’s mother
Wine Education - WSET 2 at Napa Valley Wine Academy - enabled her to ask winemakers more educated questions
Start as a travel blogger while a real estate agent with a degree in fashion
Other social platforms
- Tried TikTok
- Wants to expand into Pinterest, YouTube
- About to launch a blog
Focus on food and wine pairing
Now full-time Instagram
Content creation
- Writes captions the morning of posts to harness more creativity and authenticity, not as pre-planned
- Spends ~20 hours/week on Instagram
Engagement with wine brands
- ~10 brands / day reach out on DM
- ~50% for samples / ~50% for business requests
- Nobody asks to post for free anymore
- Wine Access relationship
  - They are looking for more awareness
  - At the beginning - pay per post + $/new customer
  - Used link in bio and swipe up to track
  - Also did a discount code for tracking
- Louis Jadot
  - Giveaway for 1 year IG anniversary
  - 2 Zalto glasses
- Hierarchy of paid relationships
  - Lowest - posts for free products
  - Stories
  - Giveaways
  - Paid posts
- Most successful partnerships
  - Wine Access - longest running
  - Burgundy - going to do a new, big campaign
  - Love Jadot giveaway - best 1 post
- Sends stats a week later to brands, wants to track more stats
- Determining wine brands to work with
  - Must be authentic with brand / IG
    Max 2 things / week goal -> story must be about Taylor’s wine journey
  - Says no to a lot of things and free wine
  - Often tries the wine first before agreeing to promotions
# giveaway / contest - IG blocks the promotion
Uses brands’ contracts now, but will develop her own soon
Media Kit
- Shows pricing, demographics of followers, engagement
- Changed pricing 5-6x in the last 4 months -> as followers grew, one of the highest engagement in the industry
Following
- 18k+ followers
- 65% male, 35% female
- 25-54 years old
- US (NY, Seattle, W Coast), London, Paris
- US, Italy, France, UK, Brazil
Building a following
- 18k in 1 year
- Being consistent
- Posting regularly - didn’t post for 1 week, took 2.5 months to get back
- Comment on every comment
- Finding like minded people in the community - other wine blog girls, etc…
- Replying to DM’s (IG loves this)
- Hashtags
  - Used hashtag generators at the beginning
  - Made a list of relevant hashtags by size (small - up to 65k, med - up to 200k, large - 1M+ posts) - pulled a few from each section
  - Used to used 30, now 20, some say magic number is 7-14
- Mistakes - not replying after posting, not posting for a while
Posting as creative outlet
- Can make borderline inappropriate captions in posts
- The “Tay” pose
Advice for brands
- Email influencers, DMs are full
- A lot goes behind posts
- Influencers are a great tool, people trust us

If you loved this episode, we would love for you to subscribe, rate and review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, cheers!

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Wine Influencer: @thiswaywithtay - Taylor Wilson

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