For a follow up to this post, check out How Can Wineries Use Instagram Better?
Okay guys, let’s sit down and have a heart-to-heart here for a moment. I’ve been breaking up with a lot of you via Instagram by unfollowing your winery accounts. And, yeah, it’s you and not me.
Simply put, a lot of your winery Instagrams aren’t worth a damn following.
Now I’m not saying that my own personal IG is gold. Don’t bother going there looking for inspiration or ammo.
But I’m not selling anything. I don’t make a dime from this blog, so my Instagram is purely for my own folly and note-keeping. Plus wineries shouldn’t be comparing themselves to personal IGs anyways. And god knows they shouldn’t be trying to emulate the feeds of so-called “influencers” which are their own kinds of pomp and circum-shit.
Instead, every winery needs to step back and think about what they’re doing on Instagram. What is the point of a consumer following you?
Is it to see a stream of spammy ads and bottle porn?
So much bottle porn…
Nope. Wrong answer.
If I wanted to see non-stop images of your wine bottles, I’d hijack your delivery truck and take it on a high-speed chase. News flash! People hate ads. That’s why we quickly turn the channel or flip the page.
So why in the world would I want to follow your feed just to see more time-wasting ads willingly? And that is precisely what your lovely, beautifully curated bottle shots in pastel locations are–ads.
Yeah, I can keep scrolling on by (which I do) but there comes a point where I (and other consumers) eventually pause and wonder–why am I following this shit? That’s when we wake up from the IG bubble and start searching for something real.
Give us dirty hands and real people.
Great pic from Chimney Rock Winery. Grandma used to say that “Dirty hands are a sign of clean money.”
That’s probably still true, but in marketing to today’s Millennials, dirty hands are a sign of real people making authentic wine.
Wine doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It doesn’t magically appear out of Star Trek food replicators. There were real people who shepherded the land and put in the time, passion and effort to turn bunches of grapes into something meaningful in the bottle. Show us that!
One of the best lines that I heard on my recent press tour of the Stags Leap District was the comment from Chimney Rock’s winemaker and general manager Elizabeth Vianna that “… at least six hands have a role in getting the wine from grape to bottle.” Then she shared some of the stories of those hands like the cellar worker who has trouble clocking in during harvest because the fingerprint reader won’t recognize his print from being so stained and worn by the low-pH of grape must.
That’s a fascinating anecdote that makes me want to see those hands and drink that wine. If I’m going to follow a winery’s Instagram feed, it’s because I genuinely want to know more about it. That’s engagement that wineries shouldn’t squander.
Tell us why we should care. Then you will motivate us to seek out your wines and visit tasting rooms.
Seeing hideously artificial “set-up” shots of people posing with bottles or a random wine sitting alone next to the fireplace, on the beach, in the woods, or whatever does nothing to inspire us to do anything but unfollow your page.
If you’re going to show me “exotic places”, why not show me the vineyard? The winery?
Great pic from the South African winery Thistle and Weed.
How many wineries talk about whole cluster fermentation on their back label and website but never bother to show it on their IG feed?
What happens in your vineyard and the winery shouldn’t be relegated to just back label jargon. Show us what happens! Yeah, it may be mundane and routine like budburst or racking, but to most consumers, these are exotic behind-the-scenes peeks into the magic of winemaking.
Every day, every winery has a gold mine of unique and interesting content ready to be featured. In the time you take to set up some plastic presentation with flowers and fruit, you could snap dozens of infinitely more interesting Instagram posts just by following around your vineyard workers and cellar hands and letting consumers see things through their eyes.
And for Pete’s sake stop with the 9 picture “puzzle portrait” spreads!
Ugh…I actually like this winery’s wines a lot but it’s hard not to be annoyed at this colossal waste of time.
My god is this not the most ridiculous waste of space (and likely photographer and marketing fees too)! Seriously, whoever tries to tell you that this is a great use of your Instagram feed should be fired.
Few things get me to hit unfollow quicker than to have my IG feed spammed with nine separate posts featuring fragmented pieces of wine bottles–all with an annoying caption to “Check out our homepage for the whole picture!”
Why?!?!?
Why do you think I want to invest my time in checking out your ad?
The People:Places:Porn Ratio
A decent PPP ratio from the Oregon winery Beaux Frères.
Every winery should go to their IG feed right now and take a look at their PPP ratio. Is your feed saturated with sad bottle porn or is it alive with personality-driven pictures of the people and places that make your winery interesting and uniquely you?
The wineries that do Instagram right tend to have a People:Places:Porn Ratio of 4:4:1 for every nine pictures. There can be variances in the mix of people and places featured as long as that last number is kept low.
The key to remember is that Instagram is for capturing attention, not commercials.
You want to give consumers reasons to learn more about your story and your wines. Instagram is a great platform to hand-deliver those reasons right to an engaged audience.
You just have to show us stuff that is actually worth our time and attention. Show us stuff that is worth following.
Save the bottle porn for print media. It’s a dying medium anyway.