By Dane O’Leary

Whether your vines are young or have yielded many seasons of complex wines, the key to success for any winery is marketing. In fact, your marketing efforts can be a bigger contributor to your winery’s success than the quality of your actual wine.

Yes, it’s that important.

And in the age of snaps and tweets, social media is arguably the most coveted wine in your marketing cellar. For this reason, we’re going to help you make your winery an even bigger success by helping you incorporate real user reviews into your social media marketing.

But first… why is social media marketing so important for your winery?

Benefits of using winery reviews in social media marketing

When we consider making a purchase today — whether we’re buying a device, a movie ticket, or almost any other type of good or service — the majority of us will go online to look for reviews. We do this because we’ve become skeptical of how companies market their own products as the Internet has made the feedback of other users accessible with just a few clicks and swipes.

Reviews tend to play a pretty sizable role in selling a product or service to other users and are often more influential than companies’ official marketing materials. Considering that social media amounts to a number of platforms where like-minded individuals can connect and share, it makes a lot of sense that you’d bring the two together by using authentic customer feedback in your social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.

For one thing, reviews and testimonials from past visitors of your winery give your social media marketing much more credibility. Rather than asserting how awesome your own winery is with just your own opinion, having reviews in your social media shows that there have been a number of people who visited your winery and legitimately thought it was awesome. It’s essentially an endorsement by real people, which is so much better and more effective.

Step 1: Choose the right reviews

The first step is to choose the right reviews that you’ll include in your social media marketing campaign. It’s important that you be very deliberate and strategic with the reviews you choose because these reviews are basically going to be the first impression your winery makes with a lot of people. But you should also be aware that your followers are going to be seeing each of the reviews featured in your campaign, so you also want to take care to be sure that the reviews are varied yet accurate and representative of the experience your winery offers.

Keep in mind that when finding ways to incorporate reviews and customer quotes in your campaigns, this will likely require permission from the review site or reviewer.

Step 2: Choose your presentation

There are few ways you can present your reviews: Text, images, and video.

Text is the easiest option as it requires little preparation or planning; you simply highlight a selection of the review, and share in a new post. Once posted, you can choose to boost or promote the post as part of your social media marketing campaign. This is probably the route to go for the majority of your review-oriented marketing posts.

Images require more preparation and planning. In short, you superimpose the desired review over a base image. Then you can post that image to social media and boost or promote as desired.

Pro tip: A tool like Canva — which is extremely convenient and free to use — makes creating professional-looking images to post on social media extremely simple.

Compared to text and images, videos take the most time and experience; however, people on social media are more likely to watch a video than they are to read text or view a picture, making it the most effective option. When juxtaposed with images and video footage of your winery, reviews shared in a short video and uploaded to your social media channels would undoubtedly garner interest.

Step 3: Share regularly

It’s very easy to post too often or too infrequently to social media. Of course, the ideal frequency will depend on the platform you’re using; for instance, the ideal post frequency for Facebook is roughly once per day while Twitter encourages several posts per day.

When you decide to share reviews as part of your SMM campaign, make sure you continue to share reviews regularly for the foreseeable future. If you share a review just once, people who follow you months later aren’t likely to see prior promotional content. But you can maximize the efficacy of the reviews featured in your social media marketing by repeating this process regularly.

Guest Author

Dane O’Leary is a writer, tech journalist and regular contributor to TrustRadius where he shares his knowledge on the latest trends in B2B news and technologies. He has written editorials, articles, and blog posts for some of the most popular publications on the web, including Android Authority, Phone Arena, NeilPatel.com, and Millennial Magazine while also publishing regularly on his own website.