Social Media Tools for the Wine Industry

Social media tools are there for companies to grow their database and talk directly to customers/clients, depending on whether you’re a Business to Business or Business to Consumer operation. It has been widely adopted by the wine industry, albeit mainly overseas.

It was great to see the uptake on the rise after a recent seminar involving Misha Wilkinson, Misha’s Vineyard proprietor, and Angela Clifford of Greystone Wines. Between the two women, they have been instrumental in trying to get the rest of the New Zealand wine industry on board and using social media marketing.

Before using any tools available, whether they’re paid or free, it’s very important that the winery website is current with up to date information on all wines, vintage reports, and that the winery blog is also in place for potential consumers to read.

If you do not have all of the above up to date there is really no point in reading any further. Readers of winery websites want up to date information, and if it’s not up to date it may disuade readers from buying your wines.

The  use of Twitter for wineries is on the rise. A great branding platform where every message you create, every conversation you have, and everything you share is good branding. This coupled with a winery Facebook page is very powerful, and almost free, marketing platform.

One platform with the most potential is the newest social media tool of all. Aimed purely at wineries, and free, Cruvee is about to take the social media wine world by storm. Used by 1,800 wineries (out of about 6,500 total wineries) in the United States and measures 1.5 million conversations about wine per day.

What makes Cruvee so important in the social media sphere is its ability to understand wine language and taxonomy. Furthermore, Cruvee is able to monitor 77 wine-specific platforms, both mobile and web-based, that may be seen as too niche to track by other social monitoring tools.It also monitors data from smartphone apps making it even more powerful to wineries.

Cruvee offers wineries to track all of the conversation on the internet about their winery and not have the white noise of other wineries in their analytics.

Make your winery website mobile before you have any fantasy that you want a smartphone app. With smart phones being the largest segment of media consumption on the rise, it’s important for wineries to focus and spent money on making sure the basics are in place before spending $50k on an app.

Join groups and sign up to event days such as #Chardonnay Day target bloggers with samples and encourage other members of your database to join in the fun.

Tweetups can be especially powerful as you end up with many people at your cellar door and you can collect all of their email addresses, after all it is all about growing your database for sales and encourage consumers everywhere that they should be drinking your wine and not everyone else’s.

Using Twtvite and Eventbrite it’s very easy to organise events at the cellar door, winery, wine bar, wine store, and distribute your event across a wide range of platforms. Posting your event to Twitter, Facebook, your personal Google + account, Youtube (if you make videos) will grab peoples attentions and get people talking, and ultimately taking part.

Once you get visitors to your cellar door make sure they checkin with Foursquare. This geo-location based app and website enables you to offer customers who checkin a discount. It will also post your whereabouts on their Facebook page and Twitter stream, even more promotion for your winery.

YouTube is a great platform for posting videos and creating a community surrounding your wine/winery. Make videos that are informative and make people want to share them with fiends. When sending wine to bloggers that make videos ask them if it’s ok to share their videos that are about your wines. Post these  videos to your Facebook wall, tell your followers on Twitter, and also Google +.

Set yourself up with a Twylah account. Twylah lets you agregate all of your social media content onto one page. It’s great for longevity and SEO. Again this platform is Free to use.

Combine all of these practices with your traditional marketing and integrate well and you’ll get a good return. Return on Investment should be viewed as Return on Involvement, the more you put in the more you’ll get out. Social media is not a stand alone sales channel and should be part of your day to day business.

Most of all it doesn’t take long and doesn’t require too much time to get engaged!

Google + will be similar to Facebook company pages, but with the ability to be searched appropriately by Google, and the other search engines. Not up and running yet but worth keeping an eye open for.

Now enjoy, and if you have any other useful tools leave comments below.

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Written by Jayson Bryant

Jayson’s roots in wine began when his father literally dragged him round France and injected his passion into him. From the age of 8 his family took month long holidays in France travelling through all regions and sampling their wine.
UnScrewed has reinvented the concept of wine tasting in New Zealand and along the way found a new and willing audience. In addition to encouraging straightforward wine tasting, Jayson educates viewers about the effects of regional factors (soil, sun, wind) on wine flavours, and how to buy wine.

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