Community is the cornerstone of craft beer culture. Beer festivals, Friday nights, happy hours, quiz nights, homebrewing meet-ups, tasting sessions, a quiet Sunday pint with friends.

Craft beer’s dependence on in-person social interaction is even highlighted by the Oxford Beer Companion, noting that craft brewers “build the brand largely by conversation”.

However, in a world of intermittent lockdowns, restricted travel and reduced discretionary incomes, we’ve had to think of new ways to engage with customers – past, present and future.

Fortunately, we have a tool that allows us to engage with potentially millions of beer drinkers at scale: the Internet.

Digital technology is a godsend to the industry during the present pandemic. We can promote our latest beers, amplify positive reviews and showcase our inventions.

While a mobile phone or laptop may not be your preferred way to talk with fellow beer lovers, there are now a myriad of ways to go some way to replicating those valued in-person experiences.

Beyond the fantastic range of styles many of us have access too, for the first time in history, there is a global craft beer community. connected through apps, platforms and website.

In this article, I will share several platforms you can use to rally online beer communities to your cause.

Untappd: Reaching The Global Beer Community

With 8 million users on their app and around 3 million monthly hits on their website, Untappd is among the largest digital platforms for beer in the world.

While good Untappd data is hard to come by, half of the platform’s users are reportedly based outside of the United States.

After diving into ranking data on the iOS App Store, we identified that Untappd remains a relatively widely downloaded app – particularly in Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong – despite various levels of lockdowns and dampened consumer demand.

Unfortunately for Untappd, the platform’s reputation hasn’t always been fantastic.

The rating system is a particularly infuriating part of the platform for people passionate about beer. Much has been written about the ludicrous ratings people give beers they don’t understand.

The company has made missteps too, recently mismanaging a festival launch and having to refund customers.

However, now is a good time to reappraise how you’re engaging beer geeks on the platform.

Untappd’s parent firm, Next Glass, just received a significant third party investment, speculatively in the range of 10-20 million USD (if similar investments are to go by).

It appears Untappd are scaling up their operations to be more global, and offer more marketing features to reach out to keen drinkers.

Furthermore, Untappd is a great way to build your search engine ‘real estate’, particularly when people are searching for your beer and venues where its available.

The platform now has 20,000 businesses using Untappd for Business, which they claim to be “ world’s largest beer menu publishing software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) platform”.

Here are a few suggestions on how to craft an Untappd strategy for your business:

• Get your brewery or venue page fully set-up. Upload your logo, make sure address and venue names are correct, and be sure to include links to your website and social profiles too.
• Brewers should keep their ‘Beer List’ is up to date, particularly ensuring beer profiles are correctly set-up: you can upload individual logos and ensure style descriptions are correct. Even better, write rich descriptions of flavour profile, ingredients (e.g. hops), and any other information that may appeal to drinkers.
• Respond to as many check-ins as you can, particularly positive ones, to drive more engagement with drinkers and to hopefully build a bit of loyalty.
• If you run a bar or taproom and you have customers regularly checking in on Untappd, Untappd for Business is worth exploring. You find out more about how it works here.
• The most hardcore craft beer geeks dive into their Untappd data and visualise it (a good example is here). Infographics and other forms of data visualisation are popular forms of content in some industries – why not try it out with your customer data?

In the coming months, keep an eye out on Untappd’s new offerings. They’re promising to significantly expand their current features for brewers and bar owners to better engage Untappd users.

A good example in the region of a venue that maximises Untappd for Business is Malthouse, a craft beer restaurant located in Singapore. Malthouse regularly update their tap lists on the platform and even has a widget on their website.

Facebook Groups: Breaking Into City and Country Level Online Communities

During the depths of COVID-19 lockdown, I organised a series of webinars interviewing craft brewers, bar owners and other beer professionals from around Asia.

After looking at the analytics, I found that country- and city-level craft beer communities were by far the most effective recruitment tools.

From India’s ‘Friends of Froth’ to ‘Philippine Craft Beer & Homebrewing Friend’, they provided the largest and most engaged audiences after a few simple posts promoting upcoming live webinars.

It was an important lesson for me: these groups are not just drinkers but they’re active communities that want to be engaged by players throughout the craft beer supply chain.

From craft beer professionals through to budding Cicerones, there is a great opportunity for kickstarting conversations, building deeper loyalty, and contributing to building the scene.

To effectively engage with craft beer Facebook Groups, here are a few pointers:

• Start by identifying relevant groups in cities/countries you are operating in. A simple ‘craft beer [city/country name]’ search will.
• Ensure you introduce yourself to group members and leaders. To build credibility and get people on your side, comment on existing posts and join conversations as a participant first.
• Share content that adds value or engages craft beer enthusiasts. Think storytelling about your latest beer; working with admins to launch an Ask Me Anything session with your team; sharing a link to a webinar you’re hosting with local brewers.
• Avoid sharing bland sales and discount content: it will likely piss people off, and admins will get irritated. Many groups also have limits on this – for instance, the Vietnam Craft Beer Community only allows one ‘self-promotion’ post per week.

Reddit

Reddit is a platform that needs little introduction to most. The ‘front page of the Internet’, it is a sprawling morass of ‘subreddits’: forums spanning niches of a dozen people through to communities of tens of millions.

In Asia, Reddit is hugely popular. According to GlobalWebIndex, 25% of Filipino internet users visit Reddit monthly, with similar numbers in Thailand (20%), Singapore (19%) and Malaysia (18%).

While I personally don’t spend a lot of time on Reddit, I know some brewers and venue owners in particular who’ve been able to use it to engage craft beer geeks effectively.

You can start by exploring the larger craft beer groups, like /r/CraftBeer/, offer a chance to join discussions about beer styles, share your perspectives on anything from sours to the state of the industry, and ultimately (with care) promote your brand and products.

There are also more technical groups (like /r/Homebrewing/) which are great to join if you’re a brewer looking to build your personal brand, give expert advice and also build greater credibility for your brewery.

Some basic principles on succeeding on Reddit include:

• While you can create a branded profile with your brewery’s name, it is usually advisable to at least sign-off with your personal name after every Reddit post.
• If you are engaging under a brand and/or your real name, be careful about what you say and do on Reddit. Avoid participating in anything political, creepy, rude or embarrassing.
• Similar to Facebook Groups, being salesy and too promotional is deeply frowned down upon on Reddit. You can use similar principles around adding value and trying to be a positive influence on discussions.

And one thing to remember; don’t take your interactions or discussions on the platform too personally.

Many people use Reddit, and other platforms for that matter, for ‘shitposting’ (pretty much what you imagine) and can be rude, provocative or sarcastic in discussions that are otherwise serious. Being a thin-skinned social media user is a great way to give yourself high blood pressure!