Update February 2018: The article and Top 20 Wine Influencers List below was published in January 2017, for a more recent list of Social Media wine personalities, follow the link below to the 2018 Top 40+ Wine Influencers List:
Update January 2017: The article and Top 20 Wine Influencers List below was published in March 2015, for a more recent lists of Social Media wine personalities, follow the links below either to the 2017 Top 40 Wine Influencers List or to the 2016 Top 20 Social Media Wine Celebrities:
There is a large number of wine entities that have a global influence. The world of wine is wide and diverse enough for all of us to write and share about it in many different forms and formats:
Long-established influencers generally built their authority over the past decades through paper publications: magazines, guides, books. The obvious ones here are Robert Parker and his Wine Advocate, Jancis Robinson, the Wine Spectator, or Decanter.
Most of these traditional wine entities made a reasonably good transition into the online world over the past 10 or 15 years and remain influential online. However, the web has allowed new online-only entities to appear (Wine-Searcher, Cellartracker, Snooth, Bottles Notes and many others) along with top bloggers (e.g. Wine Folly, The Reverse Wine Snob, Wine Anorak). These have now become major providers of wine-related information to the wine community. Online wine influence is measured by Vinepair and their Wine Web Power Index, ranking wine entities according to their impact in the US.
But social media is making new changes to the wine world’s order allowing to share and exchange about wine in an even more interactive way, more fluid and faster. Many people now spend more time, or as much time, exchanging knowledge and having fun around the topic of wine on social media than reading academic articles or books.
Entities mentioned above haven’t all yet made this new transition and adapted to the requirements of the wine community and social media. They have therefore lost a piece of their influence.
So who is active, feeding the masses, and sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many other platforms today? Who is providing the most engaging and shared content on social media now?
In other words, who to follow to see it all happening live?
Klout website provides some of the answer with analytics ranking its users according to their online social influence. The ‘Klout Score’ is an aggregate of more than 400 signals coming from eight different networks. It aims at measuring how much people interact with the content produced by each user on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr and else. The number of followers is almost irrelevant in the Klout score. What matters are how much the content is liked, shared, commented on, engaged with. So it gives an indication of the user’s influence and interaction with the wine community.
The Klout score’s formula is a secret, controversial, and surely isn’t perfect. But it seems to be the most relevant and accessible metric we have so far.
So I have gathered in the table below the Top 20 highest Klout-scoring wine entities I could find in the wine industry, together with the Vinepair Index ranking (for online influence) and the number of followers both on Twitter and Facebook. One will notice how only 10 of the websites listed on the VinePair Index are referenced in the Top 20 below.
The links will get you to the respective websites, Facebook, and Twitter pages so you can find out for yourself whether the content actually tastes good to your palate.
Klout score can go changing overtime based on social engagement around each account. This is particularly true around the 72 to 74 marks. The table above is a capture made a few days ago. Scores and followers’ figures, therefore rankings, may have varied slightly.
Other informative articles on the topic of social media wine influencers can be found on thewinehub.com and thewinewankers.com.au.
Check out our series of Q&As with Top Wine Influencers where they tell us more about their life on Social Media:
- Q&A with Jancis Robinson
- Q&A with Randall Grahm
- Meet The Wine Wankers
- Jamie Goode & Social Media
- Interview with Tim Atkin
- Q&A with Luiz Alberto, founder of the #Winelover community
- Meet Jon Thorsen a.k.a the Reverse Wine Snob
The updated version of the influencers list is available at 2016 Top 20 Wine Influencers
20 Comments
Leave your reply.