Being authentic and “real” to your consumer seems to be a paramount aspect of social media for most craft breweries.
Being smaller can also mean that is just another hat for someone already on the team to wear.
An option to alleviate that is to hire from outside and find a company that can speak a brewery’s voice on social media for them. Most breweries that responded to Brewer about the question said that they prefer to own their own voice.
“I feel the problem with outsourcing, is that most outside companies never truly understand the businesses statement to the consumer,” said Natalie Alexander, the Taproom & Event Manager for Southbound Brewing. “It’s hard to see, feel and experience what you want to portray without physically witnessing it.
“When working within, you have the passion, the message and the exact idea of what you want to put out there.”
Dust Bowl Brewing‘s mission as a company has always been to remain authentic and candid for its fans said their Social Media Manager, Liz Jaureguy. To honor this, they made the decision to develop their social media content in-house.
“By keeping our messaging from looking staged or corporate, we hope fans will feel connected to us as people who work for the love of making quality craft beer,” she said. “Craft beer as an industry is founded on the desire to support local, genuine product made with passion. Perhaps the key to maintaining this will be to ensure consumer-facing social content remains loyal to that vision.
Outsourcing your social media can be good or bad, noted Alexander Phillips, the Director of Sales & Marketing for Grand Canyon Brewery. The Williams, Arizona brewery looked at a few companies for outsourcing opportunities.
“[They had] great pitches and in the end we decided to maintain it ourselves and tell our story from our employees,” he said.
When it comes to staying in-house or hiring out, Phillips said it depends on if you’re good or better at it than who you’d hire, noting that some may pass the responsibility on to a friend or family member.
Phillips added for people looking at this option to be wary of what kind of content is produced for the company.
“Poorly made or executed content will take your brand off message faster than most things,” he said.
Southbound allows several members of their team access to all of the brewery’s social media platforms.
“If they see a great opportunity to post an image reflecting who we are and what we do, they very well can do so,” Alexander said.
Nick Garrison, the president and founder of Foolproof Brewing said he can understand why a large brewery might need to do something like this.
“Personally, I feel that myself and teammates who live and breath the business every day are going to do the best job communicating our own message,” he said. “There’s also an authenticity component at play here. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing if breweries are using third parties for social media, so long as the message is accurate and authentic.
“Hey, some of us just don’t have time. We’ve got more important things to do…like brew.”
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