The 6 Critical “C”s of Winery Social Media

Social Media is about sharing value-driven content and building meaningful relationships with your customers and potential customers online, providing an excellent method to promote awareness of your brand and to connect with your community in a relaxed environment. But are you taking full advantage of the six critical “C”s that can significantly improve your winery’s overall social media success?

Communication

How we communicate using social media is absolutely critical. It’s important to create and portray an authentic message. It’s about telling your story with genuine passion and absolute candour. When you meet someone in person you can tell if they are genuine or not. The same thing comes across online.

Wine is a social product. Make it personal. Engage rather than just inform. Rather than dry and boring tweets about how good your latest Riesling release is, try talking about how well it enhances the bounty of seafood you’ve just caught on your fishing trip and thrown on the barbie. Use what you’re doing to bolster what you’re saying.

In social media it’s important to come from a place or wanting to build relationships with others. If you come from a place of selfishness or simply pushing people to purchase your product you’ll become more of a repellent than an attractor. Start by forgetting your product and focus on building relationships. And in all relationships there is give and take. You won’t attract followers by taking all the time, or by continual self-promotion. Just as in real, offline relationships, when you give, there is a natural inclination for people to reciprocate. Giving value to others will help you become more powerful and more attractive in social networks.

Content

So how can you add value for your followers and what is good content? Good content is anything that in some way improves or enhances the experience of those who are following you. It may be your own content or it may be interesting content you share from other sources.

Winemakers may often feel that what they do is not particularly exciting, an annual recurrence of long hours and repetitive tasks with the odd pinch of excitement thrown in here and there. The consumer, on the other hand, finds the whole winemaking cycle fascinating, exotic, romantic and mysterious. To them, you’re akin to the alchemist turning unassuming grapes into gold.

People love to get to know the winemaker and social media can let customers see behind the scenes, and provide access to the people behind the wine. In the same way that restaurant customers love to have the chef visit their table, people like to feel a connection with the source. Insights and images of the winemakers at work can make your customers feel that they have insider knowledge and that deepens connections.

Create variety in your posts. Yes, you want to include your latest news and reviews but try sharing stories and photos of winery events and activities. Keep people up to date with vintage and blending and the life-cycle of a wine.

Don’t underestimate the power of videos. Pew Research recently reported that 80% of Millenials watch videos daily and comScore have stated that the average US Internet user watches 186 videos each month. Videos can educate, communicate and market and are becoming increasingly important, especially as it becomes easier for individuals to create high quality recordings. Create videos about things that, though they may seem mundane to you, consumers find romantic, exotic and mysterious, for example harvesting, crushing, pruning, blending. Remember the alchemist.

Studies by UK market researchers Wine Intelligence have shown that the number one frustration people have about wine is lack of knowledge. Why not share your wine tips and give your followers a little education about wine styles, varieties, regions or anything else they can learn from you.

Community

Community is the lifeblood of social media. In the early days of the Internet, when customers simply clicked on a link to view a webpage, online businesses lost their sense of the local and the community. Web 2.0 and, in particular, social networking has allowed “local” to be reintroduced on a global scale by bringing communities together. If you understand the community you’re interacting with you can then create content around that community that’s mutually beneficial. By providing a voice for their brand, wineries can play host to communities, drawing in like-minded customers and businesses who interact around valued conversations on the shared love of wine. The power of belonging and loyalty that a community invokes cannot be underestimated.

Social media certainly helps you to reach out and speak with people who already love your product but it also helps you connect with new people who will become part of your brand’s community. The number one influencer of wine purchases is recommendations by friends and family. If you build a generous and welcoming environment, you’ll find there will be people in your community who love your wines so much they will become your informal ambassadors and will start to recommend your wines (and your community) to their friends.

Conversation

The distinction that social media can be a conversation is sometimes lost on businesses hoping to use it simply to promote their product. Many just want to push their marketing message. But social media provides an opportunity for direct real-time conversations around your brand and your customers.

So treat it like a conversation. Rather than making your posts sound like promotional headlines, speak in a tone that you would if you were having a conversation with a friend. Be genuine, relaxed, conversational and colloquial and let your personality shine through. Consider how you would feel if you were at a party listening to someone trying to sell you insurance all night. Keep your conversation interesting and engaging, find a well-rounded balance and talk about life outside the hard sell.

Also be mindful to not become too cliquey with your personal friends and colleagues. If you spend all your time chatting with your in-crowd, especially when you’re representing your brand, it may be intimidating for customers and hard for them to get a word in edgewise.

Always remember, the conversation about your business is going on with or without you. You can choose to join the conversation, become a part of it and try to drive it in your direction. Or not.

Connection and Collaboration

Build online relationships with people from all walks of the wine industry. Don’t just limit your connections to your mates at other wineries. Connect with wine media, bloggers, retailers, restaurants, hotels, tour operators, equipment suppliers, online wine communities – the list goes on. Seek them out, “like” their pages or follow their tweets. Comment on their posts and pages. If something they say resonates with you, retweet it. Add value to the relationships you have with them, and they will value you more.

And make sure they know where to find you. If other industry members know where they can gain useful information about your wines, you become a vital resource for their customers as well.

If you’re keen to drive foot traffic back to your cellar door, why not give people a reason to visit by promoting your region as well as your wines. Provide destination advice and travel tips, promote local restaurants and advise people on what there is to see and do while they’re in the area. Give surf reports, weather reports or promote local events.

Customer Service & Crisis Management

Take customer service very seriously. Treat social media like your customer service hotline. Respond to all comments and questions in a timely manner.

When something goes wrong, this is your opportunity to shine your brightest. If you receive a public complaint, for example, here’s your chance to acknowledge, perhaps in front of many thousands of people, that you have heard the complaint and are ready and willing to offer a solution. Most people just want to know that their voice has been heard. Being able to do this graciously in a public forum and have that person walk away feeling positive about your brand is very powerful. If you receive a negative review, remain confident, positive, honest and rational. Don’t pretend it never happened. Acknowledge it and move on. Perhaps you can use creativity and humour around the review to reinvigorate sales – but never denigrate the reviewer.

This is very much just an overview of some key social media considerations and in some ways only just scratches the surface. But we’ll leave it there for now and pick up on some more specifics over the coming weeks. I’d love to hear any comments you might have from your own social media experiences. Feel free to join the conversation by sharing or posting a comment below and adding your social media tips.

Cheers!