Wine Marketers – You Need to Engage on Social Media Over the Weekend
Winery social media marketers: do you know how much you’re missing out on by not going on social media for your brand on the weekends? I didn’t mean to make this a doom and gloom clickbait headline, but I feel like I need to rant for a little bit…
Weekends Are for Customers
If you are a social media marketer for any hospitality brand, then you know that your busiest time is during the weekends. This is the time when the most customers come in and out of your tasting room/hotel/restaurant/retail shop. This also means that this is the time when the most people post pictures on Instagram, tag you in their main images, or share you on their Instagram Stories, and when a lot of people ask questions about hours, location, etc. on Facebook or other social media platforms while trying to figure out their itinerary for the weekend.
For the most part, social media marketers work from an office and have a set weekly schedule, like Monday through Friday, and they don’t check social media on the weekend.
If this is the case for your company, then your business is losing out on potential customers who might have a simple question for you in order to book a reservation, or you might miss out on those 24-hour Instagram stories that you get tagged in. After the story is up for 24 hours, you can still see that you were tagged, but you can’t see the image. Choosing to not upkeep social media connections during the weekend can be a blow to an integral part of your relationships with customers. Also - some of the best content comes from customers visiting your business over the weekend.
2 Ways to Share Customer Photos
Instagram just released a new feature: being able to easily share tagged photos on your own Instagram story. Now when someone mentions your brand, you’ll have the option to instantly repost it, adding the photo or video to your own story.
You can do this in one of two ways:
- Sharing another person’s story to your story. Click “Add This To Your Story” above the picture in your DMs.
- In the photo in the feed, click on the share icon (the paper airplane) and then “Add post to your story.”
Have fun and add your own text or animated gifs to the story. You can even change the background of the image by clicking the pen option, choosing a different color, and holding down you finger on the background until it changes color.
But remember, someone can’t share your within Instagram story’s content if he/she doesn’t see it within the 24-hour timeframe!
Actionable Takeaways for Engaging on Weekends
By not working on the weekends, you miss out on a lot. Unfortunately, social media is one of those jobs that you shouldn’t take days off from. And I know, usually whoever’s doing social media for a brand is also doing a lot of other stuff. Here are some ways to stay on top of things:
Create an ongoing reminder in your phone to check your brand’s social media accounts on Saturday AM and Sunday PM. This way you’re able to answer questions and see all of the images people have tagged you in.
If you do miss out on seeing a tag from someone’s story with the 24-hour window on Instagram, say thank you anyways and let them know that you’re sorry you missed their story! You can even ask them what they shared. It is a great way to continue the conversation and to start to build a relationship.
Over the weekend you don’t have to spend hours creating content, scheduling content, or coming up with a strategy – just checking in a few minutes once on Saturday and once on Sunday should do the trick. Basically, you just have to make your customers feel heard by answer their questions and commenting on their content. Timing on communication can mean the difference between a happy customer over the weekend, or one that never even comes by because they didn’t get a question answered.
