WineTok w/ Amanda McCrossin aka SommVivant

With the rapidly changing social media landscape, TikTok has started (as of late 2021, early 2022) to arrive as a place for wine lovers. Wine influencer Amanda McCrossin (somm_vivant) has gained momentum in this “wild west” and now has over 100k followers. She shares her journey, best practices, and what makes TikTok special.

Detailed Show Notes:

Former sommelier and wine director at Press Napa Valley, full background on Episode 12

Featured in SF Chronicle article about TikTok and wine (March 2022)

2 of Amanda’s videos converted well for wineries, 1st proof of ROI
Duhig got 1,100 signups for their mailing list from a video
Massican got $3,000 in sales and 70 list signups from 1 video

Recent shifts that allowed Amanda to excel on TikTok

Understanding TikTok is short form content vs dance videos (not social media)
Time limit increases (15 sec -> 1min (summer 2021); 1 min -> 3 min (Fall 2021)) -> enabled ability to dig in deeper (can technically do 10 min videos)

TikTok vs other platforms

Can’t DM w/ people, need to be following them
Conversations happen in comments
Ability to go live
Ability to reply w/ video in comments (“Duets” - do side by side w/ another’s content, Amanda did one w/ port tongs that has 2M views)
IG reels (only 30 sec - 1 min) don’t have as much educational content, trends usually 3 weeks later than Tiktok
IG feels older, more copycat, behind on trends

Demographics - female leading

Amanda’s - 75% female, 25% male
US, Canada, Australia top regions
Over 21 years old, deep into 30s and beyond, Over 50% of platform is over 30 years old

Amanda’s TikTok journey

Started July 2021 as an experiment
Decanting video got 30k views, but stalled out
Dec 2021 - started posting 2-3x/day, 1 video hit and others started snowballing
Still “wild west” on TikTok for wine
In 1 month went from 250 -> 30k followers (Jan 2022), now 110k followers (Mar 2022)

TikTok best practices

The “hook” is key - 1.5 seconds to catch people’s attention (e.g. - what you do, say, or put on the screen; Amanda puts topic of video on top)
Spend 2 weeks - 1 month to watch and listen
Post multiple times per day (Amanda now does 1/day)
Need quickness in video
Stay within a niche -> helps algorithm find the target audience
Optimal video length - 2 mins for Amanda (was 7-9 sec on TikTok for a while)
Need to react quickly to trends

Restrictions on alcohol (a grey area)