The Shout Magazine (New Zealand)

Mastermind Consulting releases paper on the state of Australian and NZ Wine brands on Facebook

wine_facebook_mastermind_whitepaperMastermind Consulting, a Sydney-based marketing consultancy that specialises in digital and social media, has released a comprehensive white paper titled The State of the Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry on Facebook . This is the first known paper of its kind, focusing specifically on the Australian and New Zealand wine industries to provide general trends and insights for wineries to consider as part of their broader marketing plan.

With 16 million Australians and New Zealanders spending more than eight hours a month on the platform (March 2015) and 46% of all social sharing related to brands taking place, Facebook is certainly a platform on which wineries need to have a presence, at least to respond to consumer feedback.

There are currently more than 30 million businesses on Facebook, with approximately two million advertisers competing for eyeballs. And yet, Australian and New Zealand Wineries have generally been slow to adopt the platform and use it to build strong communities for their brand.

Compared to other industry verticals, the size of the wine communities on Facebook are small, with even larger brands having a small presence relative to the size of their overall marketing spend.

The report looks at a sample of 51 brands, with more than 2500 brands anecdotally researched in order to draw conclusions about community sizes, engagement rates, interactions and implications for success. The paper also includes Top 10 Tips for wineries to improve their marketing performance on Facebook, and four cases studies of Australian and New Zealand wineries that represent interesting examples of how these brands have performed over the past few years.

Key insights of the report include:

•  The majority of Australian and New Zealand wine brands have communities of less than 2000

fans – often resulting in a limited organic reach of posted messages.

•  Engagement on many wine brand pages is low (about 1% on average) regardless of the size

of the brand, with content not necessarily appealing to consumer needs.

•  It’s not always the bigger brands that have the best interaction levels – many medium-sized

brands that appear to have a solid content plan in place are achieving greater traction.

•  There is very little use of video as part of the wineries’ content mix, yet statistics show that more than 50% of Australian Facebook users are watching at least one video per day.

To read the White Paper’s findings head to:

mastermindconsulting.com.au