Bacn

As I write this post I am preparing to update my woefully out of date list of wineries on Facebook. Since I started this list, I have tried to follow every winery Facebook page so I get a lot of email everyday. And what I mostly see is not pretty; in fact most of it is simply Spam. But since I have opted in to getting these messages, the more correct term would be Bacn.

Whatever you call it, a constant stream of messages will not keep your fans following you for very long as Joel Vincent demonstrated this week. And he’s right, show your audience value and they will continue to follow you. So here are some tips for wineries to use Facebook more effectively:

Send One Mass Message A Month: Think of Facebook as an extention of your email marketing efforts. The more you send, the lower the results tend to be. In fact, extensive email marketing will hurt sales as it becomes too intrusive. So put together a newsletter-like digest message with upcoming events, new releases, winemaker notes and whatever else fans might be interested in. Just sent this no more than once a month (quarterly would probably be sufficent for most wineries).

Target Your Fan Updates: Facebook has a powerful, but apparently overlooked, feature that allows you to send messages to people in specific geographic areas. So instead of sending all fans that event invite, just filter on those fans closest to the winery. To use this feature, click on the “Target this update” box and choose the location of the receipants. You can also get fancy with gender and age which might be useful if your event is targeting a specific demographic group.

Give Fans A Reason To Visit Your Facebook Page: But the most effective way to prevent Facebook bacn is to very sparingly use the update feature. If you produce engaging content regularly it is not difficult to aggregate this content on your Facebook page. I’ll be blogging next time on how to set up your page using a new tool called Involver.

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