Ep. 1548 #WineTok | wine2wine Business Forum 2022

Since two thousand and seventeen, the Italian wine podcast has exploded. Recently hitting six million listens support us by buying a copy of Italian wine unplugged two point o. Or making a small donation. In return, we'll give you the chance to nominate a guest and even win lunch with Steve Kim and Professor Atilio Shenza. Find out more at Italian One podcast dot com. Italian wine podcast is delighted to present a series of highlights from the twenty twenty two White wine business forum, focusing on wine communication and bringing together the most influential speakers in the sectors to discuss the hottest topics facing the wine industry today. Don't forget to tune in every Thursday at two pm, Central European time, or visit the Point Wine dot net for more information. Wanna set a tootsie. Today, we're gonna have a very important, talk with Amanda McCrossing. She's, one influencer and a content creator. She's gonna tell us, her story and how she's became very famous right now. And, I have to tell you that I've met, Amanda just a couple of days ago. I do admire her because she's a very pure person So follow hair. It's really nice to meet everyone. I'm also very excited to see how many of you showed up for a seminar on wine and TikTok. In fact, last year, if you had asked me at this very time, If I'd be doing this, there was absolutely no chance because this time last year I had approximately two hundred and fifty followers. That's it. A very little presence on TikTok. It was not something that I focused on My background was actually as a sommelier and I worked at restaurants in Napa Valley, which is where I reside. I started creating content on Instagram and on YouTube about seven years ago, but TikTok was not a factor in anything that I was doing until about December of last year when everything changed. So what happened? What changed and where am I at now? First, I think just out of curiosity, how many of you are on TikTok? Okay. So not a lot of you, very interesting that you're here, which tells me that maybe you're curious or someone has said you need to go to this because you maybe work for a company that says tell me more. Right? So very interesting that not a lot of you are on TikTok. I think understandable, the wine industry has been a little bit slow to adopt social media in general, but especially a TikTok. Let's start with what has happened in the last year for me. So like I said, this time last year, I had about two hundred and fifty followers on TikTok. I was not interested in it. It didn't make sense for me. At that point, the platform was such that you really couldn't post long form content. You could only post up to fifteen seconds and it wasn't until things started shifting in the length of time that you're able to upload that I started looking at the platform a little bit differently. So I went from two hundred and fifty followers in about this time last year to January. Just a few months later, I was at fifty thousand followers. Today, I'm at a hundred and seventy thousand followers. My videos are responsible for approximately conservatively a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in wine that has been sold in the last year. That is only what I can semi accurately predict. That's that has nothing to do with anything else that I've just generally made recommendations to go to a store. These are trackable links. These are winemakers that have reported back to me. The explosive growth of this platform is unlike anything I've ever seen in seven years of working as a creator on social media. Its ability to predict and reach audiences is unreal and there are so many reasons that we're gonna talk about why you should be being paying attention to this that I think first and foremost, We have to look at what accounts for this. Why how is this possible? Why is TikTok the way that it is? And I think, you know, I just wanna reiterate, I am not a marketing person. I have a degree musical theater. I worked as a Psalm. So I know a little bit based on what I've experienced, but I'm certainly not a marketing person. This is my experience and what I've gathered over these last few months spending time on this very powerful platform. So convergence of four factors really I think is what has led to this explosive growth in the wine category, which by the way is still very, very small. Number one, it's the algorithm, right? I think some of you have probably heard that the TikTok algorithm is is unlike anything we've seen in terms of its power and its ability to predict. In fact, if you are on TikTok, you probably know this. Right? Maybe you submitted some of your preferences and then all of a sudden you're starting to get videos that had nothing to do with your preferences, but you love them and you keep watching them. That is the algorithm, the algorithm's ability to accurately predict and target the right audience and demographic is astounding. Number two, it's sticky. It's a sticky platform. If you spend any time on there, you know that it's once you're on there, it's really hard to get off and that is by design. So it's a platform that really, not only feeds you the things that you wanna see, but doesn't require you to search, which makes it very different from platforms like Instagram and YouTube A lot of that work is put on the viewer, the consumer, the person that that is watching that content, you have to search for that. So it's very sticking. It's very easy to stand that in the platform. Number three, and this has sort of been my biggest takeaway that I think is really astounding people genuinely want to know and learn about wine. They are more interested than I've ever, ever, ever understood. And from all different facets of life, walks of life, I think the issue has been They just haven't had it contextualized. We haven't offered them the why do I care about this. And what I mean by that is I've done a few things in my time on TikTok that I realized makes this information that seems kinda geeky, right? I talk about Italian docG laws. I talk about wine list, breakdown. I talk about a lot of things that people shouldn't care about out of context, but what I do is I make it situational. And the the way that I do that is I recreate a scene many people commonly find themselves in. I identify that pain point and then I walk them through as a wine professional how to solve it. A great example of this and I'm sure many of you have been in this position before. We go to a restaurant. We're handed a wine list. It's the size of this and they throw it down in front of you and your eyes go cross and you don't know what to do. Right? Everyone has been in that position. Most peoples, especially American consumers do not know how to handle that. And so I walk them through that by offering them a situational experience that they can personally see themselves in. I identify that not only is it a pain point that you experience that many people experience and then I walk them through how to break that down. And number four, I make it a primary focus of mine, and this is really what changed it for me of being consistent and posting regularly so that the algorithm can accurately predict where this content needs to go. So now that you know how this is all happened, I have to say that You know, I feel like I've I've caught a wave, but the clock is ticking. And in many ways, I think TikTok is where Instagram was about five years ago. So the opportunity is definitely there. We just have to capitalize on it as an industry. Other industries are doing it with great success. We see it with fashion. We see it with beauty. We see it with food. We see it with incredibly random things like coolers and and things we never thought we'd actually wanna buy before. I think yet he's a great example of this. Right? But this is a blue ocean. So if you wanna capitalize on it and I think you should, let's talk a little bit more about TikTok and what it is. So what is TikTok? Well, first and foremost, I think the biggest hurdle that I personally had to overcome that I think a lot of other people have to overcome is switching your perception of TikTok from being this fun app that kids dance on and create choreographed videos to this app that really allows you to share and consume short form content is an entertainment platform. So if you want to create content, it should be shared on TikTok. It is not just for kids creating dance videos. It's also a platform too that is incredibly popular. As you can see from some of these numbers, it's the top free app in the entertainment and Apple's app store. It has grown from fifty four million users in two thousand eighteen. To one point four billion in twenty twenty two. It's used by one in five internet users across the world. So this is obviously something that a lot of people are using. It's continuing to grow. It's very, very, very, very popular. It's informing and motivating buying decisions. So users spend a lot of time in this platform, but also they're likely to buy things based off of what they see on this platform. Italian wine podcast. Brought to you by mama jumbo shrimp. And then as we're looking to continue to engage younger but legal drinking age audience, just wanna caveat that. As we're looking to engage with them, we have to look at who is next and where they are right now and the gen z TikTok users, you can see here forty one point four million TikTok users from gen z versus thirty seven point three Instagram. So it's already overtaken that market, from a gen z perspective. It's obviously very popular with millennials, but I do wanna talk deeper in about demographics. I think one thing that has surprised me is who is actually on this platform. Now I think a lot of people, as we've talked about kids dancing videos, that's a that's a stigma that is very much associated with TikTok for good reason. But I think if you look at these numbers, it's really interesting, right? Because we we don't assume it to be a platform that is for an older demographic. So if you look at this breakdown, under eighteen, twenty eight percent, that makes sense. Nineteen to twenty nine is a really interesting range of age. Let's skip to thirty to twenty nine, eighteen percent, and thirty nine plus nineteen percent. So if we were just to conservatively estimate that maybe fifty percent is gonna be twenty one or over, right? That's gonna still give you a combined total of fifty four point five percent of a demographic that's on TikTok is over the legal drinking age in the United States. We're not even talking about the rest of the world. So majority of the people that are on TikTok r of legal drinking age. I think this has been an argument against TikTok for a very long time. This is something that I think needs to be dispelled and needs to be watched. This is also a category that will change. Right? We get older. There's no stopping that. Lord knows. So we continue to get older. So we need to meet them where they are and make sure we're there when they arrive. As far as what older demographic is doing on TikTok, I think one of the most surprising things that I found is that the boomers are on TikTok. I think we all assume that my mom is not doing it. She's on TikTok. My mom is on TikTok, and I know that lots of people, of that age are on TikTok. And the reason that I know that, this is kind of a fun anecdote. Two things. One, whenever I post a video and I talk about a wine, it's a little more seasoned, fifty to sixty years of age, and I say this is an older bottle, I definitely hear about it in the comments. They let me know that sixty years is not that old. So I think we can correctly assume that may be, that my mom is on there. Right? Anecdote number two, and this this was really interesting as we're talking about spending on this platform. Anecdote number two, there was a video that I posted, that recommended a wine that particular wine did did very well for this winemaker. She did not pay me to do it. She called me up a couple weeks ago, and she said, you'll never believe this. I said, what? She said, this person bought a case of my wine. Now, a case of her wine. Her wine costs a hundred and twenty five dollars a bottle. So a case is twelve bottles. Someone bought a case of her wine and they lived in the county next door, so she went to hand deliver it. And the person that opens the door when she goes to deliver it is in her sixties. A female in her sixties that spent fifteen hundred dollars on a case of wine. Where did she hear about that wine? From my TikTok video. So the boomers are not only there, but they're spending, which means we have a wide range of audience that we are looking at in terms of buyers, watchers, and people who are paying attention to this app. So let's talk a little bit about where this app fits in because I think a lot of people are kind of at the point where they're like, alright, I have Instagram, maybe I dabble on YouTube, where does Instagram fit in to the scheme of things? How is it different? How is it the same? Should I actually be on this platform? Who is on this platform? So I think the easiest way to start breaking this down is their purpose. So if you look at YouTube, its primary purpose is entertainment. There is no social function of YouTube, meaning you're not having conversations with people that are watching your videos. They're just there to consume content, maybe they researched it, and maybe they fell down a rabbit whole, but ultimately they went to that platform just to be entertained not to socialize. Instagram is sort of a hybrid between this social and entertainment, but it started as social first. I think the other thing to perhaps mention at this point is that we're seeing a lot of crossover between some of the features that these apps provide and are now including. They're all trying to take away market share from each other, but I think the one thing that's been very clear is that TikTok has been well ahead of everyone else. So Instagram is sort of your hybrid model. So you've got your social element and you've got your entertainment element. One point four billion users on Instagram. Interesting that YouTube really has the majority of the market share here. A lot of that has to do with the searchability function with it being combined with Google. That is something to pay attention to. Way to share on Instagram. So you've got stories, you've got photos, you've got reals, and then you've got which is a video of up to ninety seconds, and then you've got your live videos, YouTube, a lot of the same thing. They've just included shorts, which is basic a copycat of Reals and TikTok. You can upload longer videos, but I think it's important to note with YouTube, the quality of content that you need to put up there is much higher. So you're looking at content that needs to be shot on a high resolution camera, properly edited, good music, good sound. There's a higher barrier to entry for YouTube. When you look at TikTok, it really is a low barrier to entry. It's gone from fifteen seconds and it's nascent stages. To sixty seconds until three minutes. So three minutes is now the maximum amount of time that you can record a video within the actual TikTok app ten minutes if you wanna upload it. Meaning If you wanted to film your video outside of the app and then upload it to the app, you could upload a ten minute video. So now that you know all about TikTok, Let's talk about getting started because I think, or a lot of you here because you just don't know where to start. That feels like a common theme. Right? I tell people at TikTok, and their reaction is, well, my daughter uses it or I've heard about it, and I think it's really interesting, but I don't know where to start. And I think a lot of people feel that way. I felt that way. When I first got on TikTok, I didn't know where to start. And so I thought the best way to do this, I think, is to just stop, don't host, and just research. I'm I'm a research junkie. I love to deep dive on things and the best way you can research is to just spend a little time on the app. So if you are someone that wants to get to know TikTok for your brand, for your winery, for whatever it is you're doing. My recommendation is to open and download the app, first of all, download the app, add to that billions of users, and spend about thirty days, thirty minutes a day, just getting to know it, get to know the content, and take notes. Look at what was really interesting to you. Take note when you watch a video, then that's on the longer side, especially when it's something that maybe you didn't know you were interested in. And I think what you'll notice is a few things, and I have up here what's called the for you page, the FYP, and Going viral. These are the things that you're gonna notice on your for you page. Now you'll also notice on on this little doggy photo here that I have circled for you. So if you open up the app and if you haven't used the app yet, there's really two ways you can view content. One is following the other is the for you page. You're following page, which hardly anyone ever uses, because we all just want new content all the time. The following page is just gonna show you content from people that you're following. The for you page is really where the algorithm kicks in. That's the page that when you scroll constantly for hours on end because you've downloaded and you're addicted, when you are scrolling, it's going to show you content from people that you're not already following. It's gonna show you videos based on the Venn diagram that that algorithm has created for you. So how do you get on the for you page if someone's not following you. Well, the first thing is a good hook. In TikTok World, those first three seconds of your video is everything. It is the most crucial, it's your headline, it's the most crucial thing that you can have in your video. It has to be interesting. It has to be sticky and it has to capture their attention before they scroll up again. So your hook is basically anything from something that's really interesting to look at or what I usually do is I identify that pain point and tell them how I'm going to solve it. So if you're in editorial already and you're building headlines and you're trying to figure out how to capture those links, I think a lot of you have already identified what the hook is when it comes you writing articles. Translate that to video. What are the things that are working that are getting clicks? Is it lists? Is it comparative? Is it identifying pain points? That is your hook for these videos. I cannot stress to you enough how important that hook is. That video will never get seen by the right people if you don't capture them in the first three seconds. The next thing you can do, I'm so excited you guys are still paying attention and have your eyes up here. I have to tell you most of us don't have an attention span of more than about ten seconds. So thanks for hanging in, but when you're on TikTok, you gotta switch things up. So keep people's attention by incorporating things like switching angles moving in and out of different cuts. You can add text on screen, switch it up about every ten to fifteen seconds. It tricks your brain into thinking that you're watching something else. It's incredibly important for people to stay on that video once they've already gotten past that three seconds. That's a great way to do it. The next thing you're gonna do is use the captions. Now, brilliantly TikTok has this feature where the captions will be auto generated. You just need to go in there edit them to make sense. We live in the wine world. Nothing is ever autocorrected correctly. So you're probably gonna have to recorrect cabernet sauvignon and San Gervais and Nebula. It's fine. Just do it. The reason that that's really important is because of the search ability function that TikTok provides. Now, one of the things we talked about with regard to YouTube was YouTube is connected with Google. Right? So when you search something like how to make sliced bread, that's a thing we make in America. You would Google how to make sliced bread and a video would probably come up from YouTube. We don't have that feature with Instagram. However, we do have that feature with More than ever, TikTok videos are coming up as recommended places to look for answers to commonly asked questions. So if you're delivering educational content, and delivering answers to questions that people regularly ask, you want to make sure that you've got your captions in there so that it helps with the SEO. It's also really helpful because a lot of people won't actually have sound on. So you wanna make sure that you're capturing that audience as well. Also, I tend to speak very quickly. There's a lot to say I'm editing very quickly captions are very helpful. On that same note, five to eight hashtags that are niche. We're all in the wine industry. Being niche and being in your category and staying in your category is really helpful for TikTok to identify who you are and what your audience should be. So using hashtags that are broad, but relevant to your niche is really helpful. And then putting that wording in your video. So again, that reiteration of things that you're saying, expanding upon things that you're saying so that you're you're helping to assist with that attention span but then you're also helping to assist with the searchability function of it. Overproduction is something that I see a lot of brands do initially. They get really caught up in trying to be so perfect as we often try to do in the wine world because everything's so beautiful. We want it polished. This is not the place for that. Dump it down, film it on your iPhone. Don't make a big deal of it, and please do not hire a big production team to make your TikTok videos. They do not work on this platform. I don't know exactly why other than to tell you that most of the people just like a little transparency. They like a little grit. They like there to be just something that feels very authentic and polished videos feel very inauthentic at times. So that doesn't mean they shouldn't be great, they shouldn't be full of flaws, but it does mean that you should try to bring it down a little bit and don't try to be so perfect about it. Also, just being off the cuff, you know, just getting on there and delivering something that's really interesting in your day. Don't think twice about it. I think a lot of people really overthink this, but picking up your phone, whether you're the wine maker or the brand ambassadors showing something to someone that you found interesting cannot be underscored enough people find our world fascinating. They just wanna be a part of it. Let them in. This is a great way to do it. Editing outside the app is great, but I do highly recommend editing in the app at least when it comes to the titles and the wording that you're putting on screen. All of my editing with TikTok for the most part, but when it comes to adding the words on screen, really important like I said that you do that because that will help with SEO, as well as the fact that it just looks more off the cuff and native again, the more it can look like it came from TikTok, the better. The one thing I wanna I wanna mention because I didn't discover this till way too late was you don't wanna say link in bio. This is a really weird thing that TikTok does and nobody else does if you say it, if you put it on screen, immediately your video gets kind of flagged. You know, they they don't love to see that. You can't put it in the comments. So a lot of times you'll see creators and people that are making videos, mouth it or purposely spell it incorrectly. One thing that TikTok does love is shares saves and comments. So encouraging those kinds of things in your video is great. For example, I think a great caption sometimes if you're a beautiful winery and a wine region, Hey, save this video for when you're planning your trip to Piedmont. Right? It's a subtle reminder to people to keep mental notes of these videos, but it's also a great way for the algorithm to know that people find this content valuable. Anything you can do to make sure that TikTok algorithm knows that this content is getting to the right people and that they find it valuable is great. And the last thing that I wanna say on the actual production of this, and this was really critical when I started producing content, one of the things that, TikTok allows you to do, Instagram just started rolling out this feature is replying to comments with a video. So I was shocked when I started putting out content and I got tons of questions from people. I can't keep up with how many questions I get. They're super curious. But what I would do is reply to those comments with another video and that would help to sort of snowball the audience, I mean, and help the algorithm to continue finding a deeper audience based off of the fact that I had already produced this one video that did really well. Someone asked a question about it. Here's the follow-up. I think those things really play really well together and it also shows that you're engaged with your community. You can't really work in the DMs like you can on Instagram, but you can engage with them in the comments, which I think is critical. Let's talk a little bit about what you should definitely not do. The community guidelines, The things that will get you banned from TikTok. So alcohol and TikTok, not great friends. We're cohabitating nicely, but we're definitely not BFFs. The community guidelines on TikTok very clearly state that you cannot sell alcohol or obviously any other control substances. So how do we get around that? What do we do to avoid getting flagged, avoid getting, you know, issues from our legal department? The way that I get around it and it's, it has worked really well is education. So we focus on education. We don't sell wine. If you are a winery, just be very careful about what what websites you put up there in terms of clickable links. You'll have one place to put that in your bio. When you get to a certain amount of followers, but just be very, very wary and very cognizant of the fact that anything that can be perceived as you selling alcohol will get flagged, will get banned. I think it's a three strikes you're out situational at TikTok. I haven't gotten far enough to find out for sure, but I have done really well so far in evading any type of, punishment from them, which has been great. So education is great. And as you're thinking about what you can be doing to have a plan for yourself, education is a great way to go, voyeuristic videos are a great way to go. Like I said, we all work in beautiful places and beautiful regions for the most part with great wines. We have great content sort of built into the fact that we work in amazing industry. Highlight that showcase that as you're thinking about what kind of content you wanna build out, have a marketing plan. I mean, as much as, you know, this is a great platform to share your journey and your wine or whatever story you wanna tell This is not a I'm gonna save your company kind of thing. You do have to have a marketing plan. You have to be clear about what your objectives are. You have to be clear about who you want in your videos. Is it your winemaker? Is it your brand ambassador? So don't go into this without at least some sort of strategy if you're a brand. Identify what kind of content you want to make and then go from there, but having a plan is key. And then working with creators is another great way to go. There's some great influencers that are working in all different capacities on the platform. I will say you know, I think what's been really interesting is if you look at the creators that are working in the wine talk space we are very diverse. I think of the top ten right now. I'm the only white female. The top creator is an Asian male, Hispanic, a Latino female, a Latino Sommelier, we are well represented, and I think that's really key to why TikTok has been so great for the wine industry at large because it does give you the opportunity to reach these different demographics through some of these creators who maybe would not have otherwise had a voice. So I think looking at that as a platform to really help with diversity is a great thing that we should be doing as an industry. With that, I'm gonna open it up to Ilearia and or questions. Firstly, I would like to thank you Amanda for going through that kind of new social media that it's very interesting and thank you for being here. So I will say that there's Oh, that platform and that for what she was sharing with us. Listen to the Italian wine podcast, wherever you at your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, email if them, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time. Cheaching.