by Tim Elliott on August 5, 2011
A Facebook page has become one of the most engaging social media tools for wineries so driving more people to “like” your page is a priority. Facebook has rolled out several social tools over the past few months and my current favorite is the Facebook Like Box. This tool brings your Facebook page wall to your website or blog but also allows visitors to “like” your page without going to Facebook. And it’s a very easy 3 step process to add your own Facebook Like Box to your site:
- Visit your Facebook page and get your Facebook Page URL. Hopefully this is a vanity URL you have set after your first 25 likes but a standard URL will work.
- Visit the Facebook Like Box page and fill in the form. You can make the widget the same size as your website or blog sidebar. Once you are done, click on the “Get Code” button and copy the iframe code at the top or XFBML code on the bottom (that’s what’s in my sidebar right now).
- Paste this code into your site where you want it. For WordPress sites, just paste into a plan text widget on your sidebar.
You can see this in action at the Cartograph blog. The only downside is the widget takes a moment to load since it’s coming from Facebook. I think this slight loading delay is very much worth it given the benefits the widget brings to your site.
by Tim Elliott on July 12, 2011
It has been exactly two weeks since Google announced their new social networking service Google+. And some early adopting wineries are already kicking the tires even if the service is still in a limited release requiring an invitation (more on that later). So I thought I would give a short summary of what Google+ offers wineries and some impressions after using the service for a few days.
First, Google+ reminds me a lot of Twitter circa early 2007 although it shares more with Facebook and Friendfeed than the popular micro-blogging platform. It has the same vibe as Twitter five years ago and many of the same early adopters in the wine industry are there right now attempting to figure out where it fits in our industry. Google+ is sort of a mashup of Facebook and Twitter but does not require the friend permissions system of Facebook making it more open and indexable into Google’s search engine. But to their credit, Google has also provided ways to post content to limited groups of people, a la Facebook.
The main difference from Facebook is Google+ enables you to build communities of interest called Circles using an innovative, game-like interface. Google gets you started with obvious Circles such as Family, Friends, and Acquaintances but you can create as many as you like. Even better, you can put people into multiple circles so you can both follow and message based upon interest or relationship. Once your Circles are complete you can choose to post to them or to everyone you are connected to. So for instance I can post wine-related content to wine industry contacts and bloggers and vacation photos to just my family and friends. This feature is much easier to use than Facebook friend groups which I abandoned quite a while back.
There are other innovative features to Google+ but the most interesting to me is Hangouts. These are ad-hock video conferences between up to 10 participants. Last Friday evening Rick Bakas hosted such a Hangout sharing weekend wine picks. Since most laptops these days come with video cameras, Hangouts are much easier to do and is currently totally free. I see great potential for wineries using Hangouts to connect with customers, hold small virtual tastings, and extend their customer service.
But like Twitter in early 2007, I don’t see an immediate need for wineries to adopt Google+ just yet. Later this year company profiles will be launched providing a winery with Facebook Page-like functionality. Until then I recommend only early adopters jumping in and creating a personal profile to join the conversation and check it out. If any readers don’t yet have a Google+ invite, just send me an email to acanmedia (at) gmail (dot) com and I will hook you up (Google profile or Gmail is required right now).
Google+ shows a lot of promise for being an alternative to Facebook AND Twitter. Once Google integrates more of their services to this social network it may surpass Facebook as the most engaging social platform for wineries. But it’s very, very early days right now. You can connect with me on Google+ here.
by Tim Elliott on June 30, 2009
[singlepic id=3 w=320 h=240 float=center]There are many in the wine industry who don’t believe in social media. Many others need more information in order to make up their minds. The rest are trying to figure out how to get started. But when I encounter those who are not on the social media bus, I simply respond with:
“Social media today is where websites were in 1994…”
As a marketer who fought the internet battles of the mid-90′s and then again in the dot-com years, I have developed a philosophical attitude toward such things. Either you get on the bus with us now or you will really want to know how to do social marketing in 2-3 years when that’s how wine is marketed; your choice.
I was reminded why I hold this opinion by a piece today at WineBusiness.com. Dr. Liz Thach of Sonoma State University lays out some very interesting data about how the Millennial generation is taking to wine. Money quote:
More than 65% said their preferred method to make a purchase decision is based on “word of mouth.” So where does the “word” emanate from? In most cases it is with friends in either face to face settings; online social networking forums; or via texting.
So online and mobile marketing is the way wine and everything else will be sold to Millennials who make up the largest block of consumers since the Baby Boomers. This may be the most compelling evidence I’ve seen about why wineries should get into social media. Many of their current and all of their future customers will demand it.
by Tim Elliott on June 7, 2009
When starting up a client Twitter presence, I start with a seed list of active wine bloggers and enthusiasts. The process is pretty simple, basically logging into the new account and then visiting my Twitter friends page on my company Twitter account and mindlessly click on the follow button. Brute force but it works.
These days there are hundreds of wine enthusiasts on Twitter and this process takes a lot more time than I’d like so I’ve been looking at ways to automate this process. Sure there are applications out there that auto follow based upon keywords but this is not as precise as I’d like it to be and slightly spammy.
A couple months ago, Josh over at Pinotblogger posted a method to use the list of wine Twitter users to automatically follow the entire list. Being someone with pretty decent technical chops, I tried his process but couldn’t make it work. I abandoned this and started to look around for a way to clone one of my existing accounts and then move it over to a second account. This is when I found Friend or Follow and Tweetake, both applications that allow you to backup your Twitter activities in a text file. From there it was an easy search to find Twitterator which loads a plain text file of Twitter users and automatically follows them.
So I put these together and came up with the following process to grow your Twitter followers without much manual effort:
- Copy the list of wine Twitter people here. Paste this list into a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit. Make sure you have a plain text file (for example, the default in TextEdit is RTF but can easily be converted into plain text under the “Format” menu).
- Change your Twitter password. It doesn’t have to be a very secure one as it will be just used for a few minutes.
- Go to Twitterator, enter your Twitter credentials and paste the list of wine Twitter people from step 1 into the big box. Click submit. Now sit back and wait for the script to run and in a few minutes you will be following hundreds more people on Twitter. I’ve found that there have been errors of some sort each time I’ve done this but it still seems to work pretty well. Once the script is complete, go back and change your Twitter password back as you’ve just sent it out in the open, a security risk. I haven’t had any problems with someone taking my account over but it is good practice to be safe here since Twitterator does not use any secure authentication.
- This is sort of extra credit but I thought I would throw this one in. After a few days most of the follow-backs will happen. If you have an existing account with several hundred (or over 2,000 in one of my accounts) you will no doubt miss follow-backs on your end. I’ve found that using the Twitter web interface to be tedious so Friend or Follow helps with this, as well. I like this over similar sites like Tweetake and Tweeptracker as you don’t have to login to get your results. Just enter your username into Friend or Follow and wait for it to grind through your account. At the end you will have three tabs that have people you follow but don’t follow you back, “fans” who follow you but you don’t follow back and “friends” who you follow and also follow you. On each tab there is a “CSV” link to download this data. For me, the most useful tab is “fans” which I download, open in Excel and sort by number of followers. Then I just look at the descriptions to determine if I should follow these people back or not. Even though I keep pretty good tabs on follow backs, I found about 20 I missed doing this on my Acan Media account. Just cut and paste the account names into your text editor and then revisit Twitterator (don’t forget to change your password temporarily).
Can’t Friend or Follow be used for spamming? Well, yes, it can but I think there are a couple things here that might prevent this. The first is Twitter’s limit of following 2,000 people. Once you reach that level you can not follow anyone else until you get enough follow backs. The second reason is Friend or Follow chokes on large accounts so as tempting as it is to download Gary Vayerchuk’s Twitter followers, it just doesn’t work.
Now that you have followed people interested in wine, concentrate on creating great content. These can be links, events, blog posts, re-tweets or joining the ongoing conversation. Just don’t promote your winery too much to prevent people from un-following you.
A Facebook page has become one of the most engaging social media tools for wineries so driving more people to “like” your page is a priority. Facebook has rolled out several social tools over the past few months and my current favorite is the Facebook Like Box. This tool brings your Facebook page wall to your website or blog but also allows visitors to “like” your page without going to Facebook. And it’s a very easy 3 step process to add your own Facebook Like Box to your site:![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=cee74c8b-6411-467d-a14e-53b5e353db88)
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