Optimized Wine Hashtags & Best Practices for Instagram
The wine industry is ridiculously competitive and the sales process is tedious. There are visits to wine shops, education to each customer that walks into a shop, and competition from online shops. Smart wine pushers can reap the rewards of a good Instagram strategy. It’s not just about posting pretty pictures though. You need to be smart, have clear goals, be consistent and engage. Just think about it. Today, I can follow my favorite wine shop, my favorite winery, and even my favorite wine. It’s a lot less intimidating to buy a wine in a shop or to choose it from a wine list if I have already been familiarized with it online. Instagram is also a great place to track social depletions. Just think about it, every Instagram post by someone outside the industry is a bottle that was purchased. That is proof of ROI…and you can make this proof easier to track with hashtags. Today we’ll discuss the best practices for wine on Instagram, as well as some great wine hashtag tactics. Before we do, take a few seconds to copy and save the hashtags below. These are optimized wine hashtags will be the basis (but not the whole of your strategy).
Wine Hashtags
Copy these optimized Wine Hashtags by clicking on the “copy” button on your iPhone, Android, iPad or PC.
#redwine #winetasting #winelover #winery #winetime #whitewine #instawine #winecountry #winelovers #winetasting #wineaddict #winetime #winepairing #mywinemoment #winewednesday #winedownwednesday #winesofinstagram #wineoclock #winemaker #winemaking #wineoftheday #winestagram
Best Practices for Wine Hashtags on Instagram
Start off with Targeting
The hashtags you copied above are your generic hashtags. These are your basics. These will appeal to a larger audience. The issue here is that you’re not just pushing any wine. Yes, you want to reach all wine consumers (and you want to convert them), but just like when you’re conducting a tasting, it is much easier to convert those who already like or know your product. On top of that, due to the nature of the Instagram feed, when you use the #wine hashtag, you will quickly drop on the feed due to the large number of posts tagged this way. When you use more specific hashtags, you will give yourself more visibility with the right people. The sweetspot is using a combination of general industry hashtags and targeted that have between 50,000 -500,000 uses. Check out this post from Loire Valley Wine who uses the Socialdraft dashboard. They really get specific with #LoireValleyWine #LoireRose which are very specific, but they don’t ignore the more general audience by using #winemonday #winesoffrance #vineyard and #frenchwine.
Use Geo-Targeted Hashtags
Here’s another example from Cellar To Table. Their post is not only hashtagged #williamsburg and #brooklyn, they have also tagged the location on their post. This means that someone can discover this post and decide to go to that restaurant. That’s a bottle sold and depletion goals on their way to being achieved.
Branded Hashtags
Yes, I know this is not wine, but Cognac Maniacs ran an incredible repost campaign using the Socialdraft dashboard, so I could not resist. Notice their write up. It includes a call to action telling users to share their Cognac Cocktails with the tag #CognacManiacs. What does this do? This strengthens their brand, prompts sales, and leads to depletions. Every Cognac cocktail that was posted to Instagram with this tag was proof of social ROI. On top of that, their brand within the industry became strong. Branding is important, and Instagram can help you with this. We recommend you take time to come up with a great branded hashtag and that you teach your community to use it. Encourage them to share so you can build your brand and prove that social media can get you depletions and brand ambassadors.
Instagram Wine Tips
Tag Others
This is a smart wine pusher. Notice the gorgeous mix of generic and targeted hashtags…but then, click the image. You’ll see that David has taken the time to tag the distributor he works for, the winery in the picture, and more people in the post. All these people will receive notifications that he has posted about them. They will most likely then like and comment on the post and remember this wonderful relationship later on. Another smart social marketer.
Work with an Influencer
Influencers have spent lots of time building a strong and engage community that can convert into sales. Check out how Veuve Clicquot has partnered with Whitney, a New Orleans visual artist. Working with her allows them to reach out to a whole new set of customers. You may not have the same budget as Veuve, but you can work with smaller influencers as well. They can be just as powerful. If you haven’t yet worked with an influencer, click the following guide on how to collaborate with an Instagram Influencer. Just make sure you follow all the FTC rules.
Put some love into your account
All the stuff I told you above is not enough to get you a robust ROI on Instagram, there are more things you need to do:
Post Daily: Instagram is a Facebook property. They have recently implemented their algorithm. If you don’t post daily, you won’t get engagement and the algo will kick in. This means you will lose followers and that you will come up lower on the feed. Do yourself a favor and use a scheduler like Socialdraft (you can see it above) to keep yourself on a good schedule.
On the date and time that they are due to publish, you will get an SMS with the image and caption making posting a snap.
Like & Engage: The best way to get people to like your content is to spread the love. Think of each like and comment as an SEO link, a way for people to get to you. Click through on one of your hashtags. Then check out the area that says “Top Posts”. Click on each of the first 10 people on every post. Like and comment on their posts. Then head back on the Socialdraft dashboard and like 50 posts related to that hashtag. You will see more likes, comments, and follows on all your posts.
If you have more questions or need more direction on Instagram marketing, join our Social Media Managers Group on Facebook.
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