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Social Media and Your Distillery

05/18/2016 • Shawn Patrick

Managing your distillery's social media account can be time consuming. Some owners may not have the time to come up with creative ways to engage their audience. So we put together a few tips and tricks to make your social media presence known and engaging across multiple platforms.

Innovate on Platforms

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have been around for over a decade now. These platforms have become inundated with brand awareness campaigns and marketing ploys. People expect to see ads on these platforms, so your ads and posts on these three platforms need to really grab your audiences attention to generate traffic.

Snapchat is becoming a secret success platform for brands to share the inner-workings of their operations and build consumer trust. It's still in it's infancy for brand marketing, so it will pay off to be an early innovator in that space.

Gen Z is the big user of Snapchat, often using that app instead of regular text messaging. They're starting to turn drinking age, a perfect time to grab them between snapstreaks to check out your spirits. Millennials and GenX are also getting on the Snap-train so don't shy away from innovation here.

Share Fun Updates

Don’t just send out a tweet or Facebook post every few weeks saying, “This barrel’s done.” People who have followed your distillery want to know what you’re up to. Give them a quick look into the process, share trade secrets, and make them feel like they’re part of it.

Not every post has to be about your booze either. Customers want to know you and your crew, as people. It’s not hard to build up someone’s personality, and make them virtual friends of all your followers. There are also all the cute things you can do, like adopt a stray can and have it become the unofficial mascot or place George the Drunk Garden Gnome all over the place and caption his many misadventures.

Connect Handle to Brand

Use your company or brand name when making a Facebook page, Instagram account, or Twitter handle. This makes it easy for your customers to find you, which means more opportunities to reach them. It also keeps it simple. Don’t be too clever with a social media handle. People need to understand what it means.  

If you can’t use your brand name as is, make it as close as possible. Add in 'official' or brand whiskey, bourbon, fine spirits, etc.

Check Local

One of the great things about social media is that you can reach the whole world with your message. That said, reaching a million people in Bangladesh about your whiskey that’s only available within a hundred mile radius of your Washington State distillery won’t do you much good.  

Many small distilleries should work to keep it local with good use of hashtags and keywords. Utilizing Google’s numerous tools like Maps and location targeting ads can create a web presence tied to local searches. Other options to keep it local is to use third party apps like ChatterPing to boost your profile and link your brand to local events.  

Reward Loyal Consumers

Never forget your best and most involved customers. They play a more vital role in getting your brand out there than you might realize. At least send them a personal thank you every so often, or even a free bottle or preview of your latest batch. Rewarding the most loyal customers helps cement that loyalty and lets other customers know how much you appreciate them all.

Respond Quickly

If you are sent a question, compliment, or complaint, answer it. People take social media personally. Ignoring it is viewed the same way as if you ignored them while they were standing there speaking to you. It doesn’t take much time to type a thank you or a one or two sentence answer. Some platforms, like Facebook, track your response time and can doc your posts based on low response times.

Believe it or not, complaints over social media are a golden opportunity. When a company successfully resolves a complaint that makes a customer happy, that customer becomes much more loyal. It also might alert you to a legitimate shortcoming in your distillery.