Social media is an excellent tool to reach your customers and spread brand awareness. Better yet, it’s a free tool. Having a consistent online presence allows you to stay at the forefront of buyer’s minds, and allows you to reach viewers who may not have otherwise known about your brand. But how to we get the viewers in the first place? 

Make your business accessible: There are a handful of components to making sure your business is as accessible through social media as possible. These include having a public profile, naming your profile, and linking to points of purchase. A public profile will allow anyone, whether they follow your business or not, to view and interact with your posts. This also means your posts and profile may show up as suggestions to viewers looking at content similar to yours. That being said, your profile should be easy to find and identify as yours. Simply make it the name of your winery. It can be tempting to create a unique username, but when customers are looking to find you on social media they’ll never know to search for anything but your winery name. Keep it simple. Finally, linking to points of purchase makes sure viewers are able to take action directly from your posts. While not all of your posts will be a direct sales ad, the ones that are should link directly to where viewers can quickly and easily act on your post and make a purchase.

Word of Mouth: Speaking to your current customers is a great starting point. These are people that have made a connection with your business and may already be checking your website and marketing emails for information. Make sure they know a follow on social media will give them the quickest access to the most current information. Make a small section linking your social media profiles and add it to all of your outreach to customers. 

Incentivize: Games and giveaways are a great way to quickly build your following. When hosting an online giveaway, the rules should state that the winner must be following the account. Ask your current followers to enter by way of tagging a friend. This is an opportunity to involve your current customers and give them the chance to share your brand with their friends. Another incentive you can provide are promo codes found exclusively on your social media pages. These should be unique to each of your social platforms, and can become an easy way to track where you’re most visible to customers. For example, if you post the codes Insta10 and FB10 on your Instagram and Facebook profiles respectively, you’ll know exactly where your sales traffic is being directed from based on the use of each code. Incentives don’t just come in the form of gifts and discounts, though. Make sure your regular content is incentive enough; 

Post with intent: The quickest way to lose viewers is to spam the timelines of your followers. Posting more isn’t always best if there’s no direction to your posts. The personality of your brand should come through in your posts, but people are also looking to your social media for information. Share your upcoming events, specialty hours or when new releases are coming out.

Stay Consistent: The scrolling nature of social media means viewers are seeing an endless feed of information. To stay at the forefront of that, make sure to stay consistent with posting. Select a posting schedule that you can maintain, and stick with it.