Not only is Luma Monteiro marketing manager at Davy’s, she’s behind wine education platform Wineria – and counts some 17,000 Instagram followers @wineriaofficial. Who better to share her social media wisdom? 

Luma Monteiro started her Instagram journey six years ago, reaching 10,000 followers in her first year. She concedes that the space is more crowded now than it was then, but there are still plenty of learnings.

“In the beginning, when you’re building your presence, you need to be engaging – and engaged as well. I posted constantly and answered every person.” And if you’re answering a negative comment, Monteiro recommends keeping it polite and upbeat. “It’s important that your audience sees you have addressed such a comment,” she adds.

While there are Insta accounts with followers that run into the millions, Monteiro says big numbers don’t suit all businesses, and they don’t always mean huge engagement. For retailers, she says using Instagram to talk about an event, such as a promotion or a tasting, can help attract local followers.

“Even if you only have 1,000 followers, if they are in your local community and you’re telling them something specific is happening, you will get more engagement,” she says.

Depending on the budget, she recommends using Instagram ads once or twice a month. “You can tailor them to go to people within a certain distance of your location, and you can also tailor them to go to wine people, for example. It can cost around £10-15 a day.”

On the importer/distributor side, Monteiro has a different set of tips to drive engagement. “The best thing to do when you post about a producer is a collaboration. If the other account accepts the collaboration, the post appears on both accounts.” How do you do this? Well, once you’ve uploaded content, click on “tag people” and then “invite collaborator”. When they accept your invitation, the post will also appear on their feed. “Every time I do a collaboration, we get a lot of followers,” adds Monteiro.

APP RECOMMENDATIONS

Although this all sounds very time consuming, there are several apps that Monteiro recommends to help. “As a business, consistency is very important to social media, so having a platform to schedule posts will help you plan your content. I use later.com, which is free for a certain period of time.”

She says later.com also has a great (free) blog, with all kinds of tips, including topics such as the best free social media management tools and top trending reels.

Speaking of reels, Monteiro says these are key for engagement – and she might spend up to an hour on a 30-second reel. Monteiro uses a tool, Inshot, which she says is intuitive to use for editing and voice overs. For subtitles, she uses Cap Cut, which also allows her to overlay logos on top of videos. And if you need help writing a caption, use Chat GPT.

The Lightroom app allows her to touch up images, but she says the best thing you can do is make sure your camera lens is clean to start with, because your content will only be as good as the raw material.

When it comes to music, Monteiro says using what Instagram has to offer avoids a lot of headaches, though she adds: “Make sure you use what’s trending – you will boost engagement.”

Overall, the social media whizz says it’s important not to overthink content – or make reels too long. A reel could be as simple as opening a bottle in the shop and letting your audience know it’s available to taste. You could even make that a regular feature, which will surely help with the consistency factor.