Today’s post is by guest blogger Libby Volgyes, who contributes to the Swirl Girls wine column in The Palm Beach Post and maintains the @SwirlGirls Twitter account.
This summer I made my annual pilgrimage to Napa Wine Country. While I was there, I took the time (between wine tastings) to meet with a couple of social media gurus in the wine world. I had connected with them on Twitter and wanted to meet them in real life and pick their brain on social media.
Most of the people I sought out are employed by one winery or one wine-making family, which means their job is to use social media to increase sales. Bottom line: They are selling their wine. But you’d never really know it. Because online, they are simply themselves – communicating, interacting, sharing information.
The god of winery social media is @RickBakas, director of social media marketing for St. Supéry and the first person to be employed by a winery in this capacity. Well-known in his field, he’s the author of Quick Bites: 75 Savory Tips for Social Media Success.
Libby Volgyes
Here are some of the things I learned from him and his book:
✓ Be transparent. With social media, people want to interact with a real person online, not a corporation – even if you’re representing a brand.
✓ Communicate with, not at people.
Don’t use social media simply to blast links to your content and to promote yourself. (The exception would be Twitter accounts that are set up and clearly labeled as automated RSS feeds.)
The fastest way to lose trust is to send one-way promotional messages. Don’t be a spammer.
Often when people are deciding if they’re going to follow you, they check out your page and check out your interactions. Do you engage and interact? Do you just have auto-links posted? Do you answer your readers’ questions? Do you ask your readers’ for story ideas?
Chit-chat with people, share links and retweet. This is how you build a following and a tribe that will feel loyalty to you, retweet your posts and look to you as a leader.
✓ Be positive. Think twice before tweeting a complaint or tweeting when you’re angry.
✓ Maintain high standards. Spelling errors and other mistakes erode credibility.
✓ Use a twitter handle that’s short and simple.
✓ Focus on three to five topics at the most to tweet about each day. (My idol tweets about food, wine, branding and bacon). @SwirlGirls tweets about food, wine and puppies. If you consistently tweet about your topics, people will see you as an influencer and seek you out, which happens easily for journalists.
✓ Be humble. Pay it forward. Retweet interesting, relevant links about your topics even if you didn’t write them. This creates trust among your followers and solidifies you as a resource. Get out of the “competitor” mindset.
✓ Engage influencers. If you get retweeted by a person with 10,000 followers and even a fraction of them see the retweet, it’ll still help you gain credibility, followers and hits.
✓ Know when your audience is online. I tweet often in the evening because that’s when my food and wine audience is online. I also have a large percentage of California winos in my “tribe” so I tweet on their time when they’re online.
