How to Increase Social Media Engagement for Beverage Brands

What do brands with mega social media engagement like Xbox, Paul Mitchel, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola, and Glenfiddich all have in common?

How do they always get so many likes, saves, shares, and comments on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok when you struggle so hard to get traction, don’t stand out, and your metrics are stagnating?

What they all have in common is that instead of relying on their content alone to make the difference, they drive engagement and new customer relationships with exciting incentives and UGC from their biggest fans.

But how? With sensational brand ambassador programs.

This allows their quality content to generate the impact it deserves. It also creates a virtuous cycle of UGC, sharing, and brand awareness that you need to replicate if you want to increase your own social media engagement.

By placing brand ambassadors at the heart of their engagement strategies, beverage brands can deliver successful campaigns, completely turn around their metrics, and boost brand loyalty.

👉Did you know, most brands get 300% more organic engagement within the first month of incentivizing engagement?

In this post, we explain how to grow your reach and drive engagement with a brand ambassador program that’s easy to set up, helps you quickly identify your best beverage connoisseurs, and gives you fast ROI. Also, you’ll learn tips and tricks about tracking data, curating your TOV, and what tools to use.

6 Steps to drive social media engagement for beverage brands

The most powerful way to resonate with your social media audiences is with authentic voices they trust. 

That’s why brands like Red Bull with their Student Marketeer program (”win our target group in the most relevant way thanks to your in-depth local knowledge”) and Harley Davidson with their Harley Owners Group (“Harley riders are Harley riders, there’s always that commonality”) place so much value on their most loyal customers.

👀It’s also why they have such fast-growing communities—at the time of writing, Red Bull has more than 4,000 ambassadors and Harley Davidson well over 300,000.

Ambassador programs like these magnify and multiply all your social media content and customer interactions—and to match the performance of those brands, you’ll need an ambassador program of your own. 

So follow the steps below on how to create and manage your ambassadors and turbocharge your your social media engagement strategy.

Caption: Major brands like Red Bull see their ambassador programs as a core part of their social media engagement strategy.

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Step 1: Create a social media ambassador program

🏆When you create your social media program, set it up to incentivize engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok with gamification in the form of points, goals, and rewards. 

Use a consumer engagement platform like Spitche to do this in minutes, and award points and prizes (like discounts, gifts, and invitations) to likes, comments, shares, and mentions. Also, include extras for actions like inviting a friend, tagging your brand in an image or video, or UGC. 

Now your biggest fans have a bunch of concrete incentives to engage other members of your community in your brand, and you can kick-start a positive loop of engagement-sharing-engagement—just like Red Bull and Harley Davidson.

Caption: You can create an ambassador program in Spitche in just a few minutes.

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With your social media ambassador program, you’ll be able to encourage enthusiasts to post their favorite cocktail recipes featuring your beverages on social media. Rewards could include branded merchandise, exclusive tasting invitations, or discounts on future purchases, creating a community of passionate brand advocates.

“We definitely see more engagement with UGC than with other types of content—it builds trust among our audience. It’s one thing for us to speak highly of our platform, but it’s another for our users to share their experiences. The UGC/testimonials we reshare have up to 10 times more engagement.” Morgan Greenberg, iteach

Step 2: Invite your consumers to join your ambassador program

💌Before you can get the UGC-engagement-sharing ball rolling, you need to get your beverage connoisseurs to sign up for the ambassador program you’ve just created.

Typically, there are three ways you can do this:

1. A private or VIP invitation where you manually select who you want to be part of the program (for example, your top consumers, the most active beverage connoisseurs, or people with the biggest following).
2. A newsletter, which could be sent to your entire database of clients.
3. A public invitation as part of a social media post, plus ads and landing pages, inviting everyone in your community to join your program.

In each of these cases, you can use Spitche to create a link and manage the invitation process. All your members have to do is register their social media accounts inside your engagement platform, and they’re ready to go.

Caption: Make joining your ambassador program as simple as possible.

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So, you could entice your audience on Facebook to become ambassadors for your beverage brand, promising them first dibs on new releases, invites to private tasting sessions, and the chance to win free products in return for their engagement.

Step 3: Create interactive content, share UGC, and be responsive

Now that your ambassador program is in full swing, capitalize on it by making the most of your followers’ engagements, UGC, and growing audiences.

💡Here are some ways to drive more engagement and UGC:

• Polls
• Questions and quizzes
• Creating and sharing stories
• Live streams of virtual events
• Engagement missions
• Prize giveaways
• Pop up events and exclusive invitations

For example, you could host a quiz about the origins and types of beverages, with winners receiving a year’s supply of your best-selling drinks or exclusive branded merchandise.

Caption: You can use Spitche to manage social media engagement in an all-in-one dashboard.

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Step 4: Collect customer data to know your audience and improve campaigns

🧑‍🎓As you grow your database of ambassadors, use a tool like Spitche’s integrated CRM to collect data and learn more about your engaged customers, their patterns of behavior, and what they’re interested in.

This allows you to create lookalike audiences, which you can use to: 

• Segment prospects and target new beverage connoisseurs with similar characteristics and activity as your ambassadors
• Share their UGC
• Influence the content you create and tailor your messaging

For example, you could analyze engagement on posts about different beverages, focusing campaigns on the most liked and commented flavors, health benefits, or occasions, to connect more effectively with your target consumers.

Caption: By integrating a CRM with your ambassador program, you can use data to inform your content strategy and target specific audiences.

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Step 5: Develop a consistent social media brand voice

🙋🏽Throughout all your content creation, sharing, and interactions, a strong, definable TOV will help distinguish you from your competitors and make you more relatable.

Two good examples to compare are Fitbit, the activity tracker, and Ryanair, the Irish economy airline.

Fitbit looks to be bright, driven, and inspiring. Here’s a post projecting its caring and health-positive brand (thanks to a dream post from Claire):

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Now take a look at a typical Ryanair interaction, whose TOV is characterized by direct and provocative humor:

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Both brands have a distinct TOV that aligns with their products and services, making them memorable (if not always exactly lovable) and helping drive engagement.

Step 6: Track performance and adapt strategies

🏋🏾‍♂️As your ambassador program grows over time, track performance data to see engagement rates across your social media accounts and campaigns (yes, you can do this with Spitche).

This will help you track when your different audience types are online so you can optimize when to schedule posts and interact with followers, better understand how to benchmark your success, and identify what types of content resonate most with your audience and which lead to conversions.

This could influence your tone of voice and what kinds of campaigns you invest in and advertise or show you the best way to collect feedback about the customer experience and your products and services. 

For example, identify when health-conscious consumers are most active. Tailor post timings and content to these windows, leveraging analytics to improve engagement and gauge market trends.

Caption: Use Spitche to track performance and develop a data-driven approach to your customer engagement strategies.

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Pull in your audience and multiply your social media engagement

Halting the decline in your social media engagement metrics doesn’t have to be complicated—you just need to give your followers a reason to take an interest in and interact with your socials. 

With a quick-to-set-up brand ambassador program, you can get your best beverage connoisseurs on board and start collecting and sharing UGC, learning about their interests, and adding tons of value to all your content and campaigns.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a system of points and rewards for SM engagement
2. Make ambassador registration quick and easy
3. Start sharing and responding, then sharing some more
4. Use a CRM to learn more about your people
5. Be consistent (and even daring) with your TOV
6. Track your performance to optimize everything you do

🥇And in Spitche, you have a proven ready-made solution—an end-to-end platform that turns beverage connoisseurs into social media ambassadors who pull in your target audience and drive engagement.