How Social Media Helps Build Online Sales
Vintank recently published an 86 page whitepaper, We are here. We are HERE. WE ARE HERE! The State of Wine Industry Social Media. The paper is informative with some good tips on how and where to get started using Social Networking Sites (SNS’s) to build an online presence for your wine business and brands.
The paper focuses in on Facebook and Twitter for B to C social networking and Linkedin for B to B social networking. It highlights these sites as the best high-traffic SNS’s to put your resources behind. I agree with their logic and their selections, including eliminating MySpace when bandwidth is an issue.
Also included are in-depth profiles of a number of Wine-Social sites including Adegga, CellarTracker, Cork’d, Snooth, VinCellar by Vinfolio and WineLog. Though the list is incomplete, forms are made available for those missing wine-social sites that want to be included going forward. Personally, I would have included Wine.Meetup but I’m sure that they will get added to the list in the future. The message is to “pick a pew” where your highest concentration of customers and prospects reside, map out a strategy and get busy generating content and building “buzz”.
In their purest form, Social Networks are all about connecting with people you know and keeping them informed of what you are doing. Activity is in the forefront and connections are secondary. Social networking sites work well for announcing wine events and for publishing digital media after the events. Before you jump in thinking that Facebook is the ticket to selling out your inventory consider the etiquette appropriate for social media marketing.
It takes time to build and deploy your social network for marketing purposes. While you are considering how you might leverage your friends and associates on Facebook and on other social networks be prepared and write up a plan. This is, after all, your network of friends so let your wine do the talking via tasting events with candid photos and videos that don’t look staged (Fun is infectious).
Importantly, you don’t want to garishly broadcast your sales and marketing messaging as you would with traditional advertising, but rather create the environment where friends influence friends. Join the conversation but don’t attempt to dominate or force your friends to say what you want to hear. By all means recruit content creators and editors and encourage photos and (short) videos that you can put on your site and publish on Flickr and YouTube (According to “The Global Web Index,” from Trendstream, with research conducted by Lightspeed Research, early this year 72% of US Internet users watched video clips monthly—making video bigger than blogging or social networking).
Your social site should grow organically with a little cultivation and by getting to know your friends who visit your tasting room, attend your events, sign up for your wine clubs and enjoy chronicling and sharing the social experiences/events they participate in along with the great wines you make.
This article hits it right on target. Technology has changed dramatically making it extremely cost effective for promoting wine sales via multiple on-line touch points, whereby increasing brand recognition and sales. In 2009, we created Wine Promotions, an on-line social media marketing and promotions company that specializes in promoting wineries, vineyards and wines worldwide via the best social touch points in a very cost effective way. We incorporate short run videos of less than three minutes, wine tastings, Twitter tweets, Facebook friends and fans, and many other great social media venues on behalf of our winery clients for far less than traditional marketing costs. There is a worldwide glut of wine and prices have been slashed by up to 50%. That’s where http://www. wepromoteyourwine.com comes in. Find us on Facebook under WinePromotions and on Twitter under WinePromoter. Great article guys!