Using social media to promote your brewery can be a great way to engage with and grow your audience. Still, with managing your day-to-day responsibilities and the ever-changing landscape of social media it can be overwhelming to keep up with. Add to that the pressure to participate in every new trend and you can start to feel discouraged. Not to worry – we’re here to help you get the most out of your social channels, cut through the noise, and guide you to focus on what matters most!
Here are 5 tips to help you and your team get the most out of social media for your brewery:
1. Practice Social Media Listening
Social media is more than a place to be sharing content, it is also important to practice social media listening. But what is social media listening and how can you use it to promote your brewery?
Social media listening is identifying and assessing what is being said about your product and brand on the internet.
As the name suggests, social media is highly ‘social’. This means you need to be watching for people to mention your brand and have conversations about your product. Analyze what they are saying, why they are saying it, and where they are saying it. This can help you know which social media channels your audience is spending time on and thus where you should prioritize your time. When you see your brand being mentioned, or your audience is commenting on your posts or other posts that are about your brand and product, engage and respond!
Keep in mind social media listening isn’t just about watching your brand you should also be watching those you consider to be partners and competitors. What are they doing that appears to be driving engagement? How can you collaborate with them to increase your reach?
Lastly, watch for negative conversations about your product and brand and develop a strategy for responding and using this information to make adjustments and improvements as it makes sense to do so.
2. Be Real, Genuine, and Authentic
Nobody likes a fake. Prioritize being authentic over high production value. Producing new and engaging content for multiple social media channels to promote your brewery is hard enough don’t make it harder by feeling like every photo you take, graphic you make, and video you produce has to be absolutely perfect. After all, perfection is the enemy of good.
Your audience wants to know the real you! Being authentic can help to humanize your brand and develop deeper connections that will develop a community of raving fans.
So get comfortable with good enough, taking candid photos, going live at a moment’s notice, and using social media as a way to share who you and your brand truly are!
3. Consistency is Queen – Data is King
Conduct a search for how often should I be posting and which channels should I be active on and you’ll get a wide range of responses. Many will pitch you on purchasing a templated social media calendar with predefined posting times and days and a schedule of post types to rotate through and then rinse and repeat.
This approach can feel daunting – posting multiple times a day across all social media channels is just not realistic for many breweries unless you have someone on your team who is dedicated to nothing but social media. And even then we’d never recommend you follow a one-size-fits-all templated social media calendar.
When determining what social channels to be on, when to post, and what to post, there are only two things that matter and you should use them as your guiding compass – data and doing what you can be consistent with.
As we reviewed in tip 1 about social media listening combined with the data insights each social media channel provides, you can learn a lot about where your audience is hanging out, the type of content they enjoy most, and the topics they want to know more about. After all, data is king…
…and consistency is his queen!
Do not succumb to the pressure of being on every single channel multiple times a day especially if you can’t keep up with this approach consistently. Odds are your audience isn’t even active on every single social media channel making it a waste of time to be where your audience isn’t. Focus on the channels your audience is most active, review your data for what days and times they are most active on those channels, and from there develop a posting schedule that you can be consistent with. And don’t be afraid to start slow and ramp up over time as your schedule allows. Social media channels will reward you in their algorithms for being consistent and it is better to start slow and increase over time as your schedule allows as opposed to the reverse.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Pull Back the Curtain
Remember how in point two we covered being authentic? This tip expands on that and dives a bit deeper into ways to be authentic and show who your brewery is by pulling back the curtain.
What do we mean by that? Pulling back the curtain?
Use social media to show your audience a behind-the-scenes look at your brewery. If there is any social media trend that a brewery should be leveraging it is producing ‘satisfying’ videos or ASMR content.
- Record your hops being poured into the hooper
- Show a close-up of a pouring and that beautiful beer head flowing over the top
- Make a video of the bottling or canning process
- Produce a hyper-lapse of a new label being designed
Channel that inner child who loved watching the how it’s made clips on Mr. Rogers and allow your audience to catch a glimpse of a day in the life of a brewer! This is a great way to connect with your audience, help them feel a part of the process, and produce content by simply pulling out your phone and hitting record while you do your day job.
5. Leverage User Generated Content
Producing new, fresh, authentic, and engaging content can be one of the top frustrations of being constantly active on social media and using it to promote your brewery. In the last point, we shared a tip on a way you can easily produce content by just recording your day job. But there is another type of content that can take even less of your time to produce and that is to leverage user-generated content.
What is user-generated content?
Simply put it is content that your audience produces for you! Some examples include:
- Photos of their visits to your brewery
- Providing a written or video review
- Video clips of them enjoying your latest brew
Bonus points if your audience shares and posts this content on their profiles and pages and tags you or uses your hashtags thus generating some word-of-mouth marketing, increasing your reach, and building credibility that you’re not the only one who loves your brewery.
Takeaway
Focus on what matters most and don’t feel guilty about not participating in every new trend or being active on every single social media channel. Use data to determine where you should be, what your audience cares about and is engaging with, and when you should be active, and from there develop a posting schedule you can be consistent with!
Don’t forget that social media isn’t only about sharing your content, it is also about…
- Engaging with those who are commenting and messaging
- Leveraging your raving fans to produce and share content for you
- Networking with other businesses and organizations
Social media is a place to be real, genuine, and authentic! Use your social media channels to promote your brewery and humanize your brand.
As a supplier to numerous breweries across the state of Wisconsin, Valley has collaborated with many in the industry on new ways to promote their brewery. If you’re looking for a supplier who can go above and beyond the process of sourcing and selling you ingredients and supplies, then we want to talk to you – click here to learn more!
