Wine Social Media Overview

In the ever evolving and relatively new landscape of social media, it’s important to stay on top of the trends and to participate in the right ways.  From general social media, like Instagram and YouTube, to wine specific ones such as Vivino and Wine Berserkers, it’s important to know how to engage and interact.  This episode provides an overview of the main areas of social engagement, building a brand page, interacting with influencers, and paid advertising. 

Detailed Show Notes: 

• General social media platforms
• Instagram - a visual platform (started as photo sharing), can search hashtags, powerful advertising through Facebook, younger demographic than other platforms, auto-translation powerful
• Facebook - for people you know, less organic reach, good for closed, gated communities (through groups), better for older demographics
• Twitter - “water cooler”, breaking news, doesn’t form the best communities, more text based
• TikTok - a younger crowd, vertical video focused, celebrities jumping in, content surfaced based on what you watch vs who you follow, music / audio important
• YouTube - take a while to build up, good live streaming technology, mostly people searching for something -> powerful for advertising, hard to direct connect to websites, quality bar is high since content stays up for a long time
• LinkedIn - feed and posts relatively new functionality, can dial into a very specific user base, advertising is more expensive, but can target well
• Examples: 
• Cathy Corison said social media saved her business, which included Twitter
• Jim Duane of Inside Winemaking said he got no traction on Twitter, so mostly does Instagram
• Best Practices for brand social media
• Claim your real estate - want to have consistency of username across platforms
• Tailor content to each platform - every platform is different, need to understand the user base of each
• Experiment - try different things and go big on things that go well
• Wine Specific Social Media
• Vivino - share photos of wine, rate and review, good photo recognition software
• Delectable - was big with wine industry people, not very popular anymore
• CellarTracker - inventory management, lots of data, not very social platform
• Wine Berserkers - catered to wine collectors, mostly US based, like a Reddit forum
• Benefits for Wine Brands
• Engage with your customer base, different forms of communication than email or phone calls, more visual, more frequent, can get real-time interaction (the “social” part)
• Attract and find new customers (the “media” part)
• 3 Pillars of Social Media
• Brand pages
• Social media influencers
• Paid advertising
• Brand Pages - the official page of the brand
• Purpose: retain existing customers, engage with prospective customers
• A cost effective way to build connection and interest
• Need a constant flow of content and communication
• Examples of doing it well - Champagne houses, Shafer, Jordan (had a Zoom SNL spoof on YouTube), Antinori
• Owner’s personal page vs brand page - can be confusing and dilutive, okay if the content is very different, can make the personal page private to be less confusing
• Brands with multiple pages - e.g. - Melville has a brand and a tasting room page - it may be hard to grow both at the same time
• Building followership - goal is to get 10k followers in Instagram -> get swipe ups in stories for free (vs paying), where you can do more call to actions
• Engagement
• Engagement rate = (likes + comments)/followers; 3-5% good, >5% great
• Always respond to comments
• Calls to action - for an offer or joining the mailing list; can be helpful for transitioning people between social platforms as things change
• Social Media Influencers
• For wine, followership is smaller
• >10k followers - smaller influencers
• >100k followers - bigger influencers
• Need to understand more than followers, but their content and engagement
• Types of influencers
• Lifestyle - often posts feature the influencer themselves, often more than just wine
• Collectors - drinking really good wines
• Curators - reposting content from others
• Educational - teaching people about wine
• Trade - in the wine trade
• Working with influencers
• Need to ensure the content and messaging aligns with the brand messaging
• Need to let influencers put your message in their own words to align with their content and audience
• Can provide samples or have paid relationships
• Paid Advertising
• E.g. - Facebook ads, pre-rolls on YouTube, stories in Instagram
• Post boosting - for current following to see it, for every post, only ~⅓ of the following actually sees it
• Stories are powerful - easier to do call to action via swipe up
• Important to do targeting with demographics
• Building lookalike audiences with your existing email list is very powerful