Stephanie Clark
Social media has changed the way businesses connect and engage with their customers. No matter how large or small your business is, there are so many different ways to leverage social media channels to help improve your company’s marketing and customer relationships.
A business that is doing an awesome job with their social media is Noble Brewer, a unique beer club located in Oakland, California. We interviewed Community Outreach Leader Catherine Trainor and got some insight into how they have achieved social media success.
1. How are you currently using social media for your company?
Right now, we are using Twitter and Facebook to engage with craft beer enthusiasts and home-brewers. These are the people that are at the core of who we are and what we do, so of course it is very important (not to mention fun) to talk to them!
2. How did you determine which channels you should be using?
We want to be on as many channels as possible. Right now, we have mainly been using Facebook and Twitter because there is such a wide audience there. Facebook has been a great way to connect to home-brewing clubs and home-brew supply stores, while Twitter is a great way to see what beer lovers are talking about. We’re slowly building our channels on Reddit (where there are a lot of great home-brewers), LinkedIn (where there are lots of beer lovers), YouTube and Google+.
3. How did you get started and gain traction before you had a significant amount of people in your audience?
Claude, our founder, spent a lot of time in the beginning gaining followers. It does take some time, and we still want to build on what we currently have. It really helps when we’re featured on a website like Product Hunt or Urban Daddy. But mostly it takes time and sustained effort.
4. What have you seen change in strategy or tactics between getting started and having a solid audience?
It’s really cool that so many people know who we are now! The more people know that we are a beer club that features awesome home-brewers, the more we can shift the message away from “this is who we are and what we do” and towards listening to and joining conversations. We can post more fun articles about
5. How do you currently track and measure social media success?
While we measure our success in the number of shares, retweets, likes, and favorites we get, we also really care about what kind of a response we get from the community. We really love when people comment on our posts and engage in conversation with us. When other people get really excited about our beer, we get excited too – it’s not a tangible, numeric measurement of success but it’s still really important because it tells us that we’re still headed in the right direction.
6. What are your favorite tools for managing your social media accounts?
We use Hubspot. It’s really easy because we can post everything from one place, see how it’s doing, and also listen to what other people are saying. An added bonus: Hubspot has the nicest, kindest support team and we have really been grateful for the assistance!
7. In what ways have you seen social media benefited the company and help achieve true business goals? If there are numbers or metrics you can share, that would be great but we understand if you can’t share them.
Since we’re a beer club, our main goal is to gain club members and to make it a great experience for them. But we also want to really invest in the craft beer and home-brewing communities. Social media has not driven our sales, but it has allowed us to be involved with the communities that are important to us, and this is really valuable to us.
8. If you were to give one tip for companies getting started with social media, what would it be?
It sounds cliche to say to listen (because everyone says that you should), but it really is important! What kind of a message do you want to put out to the world? What makes you special and different? What kinds of people do you want to listen to you, and what are they saying right now? That will help you craft your message.
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