Is Facebook Even Worth It Anymore?

In late 2013, I wrote a blog piece titled What Facebook's News Feed Changes Mean for the Wine Community.  In it, I shared Facebook's warning to the owners of their pages that they were going to be reducing posts' organic reach, in order to prioritize friend-to-friend content over business content.  Of course, page owners who wanted to reach more of their fans would be able to pay for that reach.

It's clear, a little more than a year later, that Facebook's changes are in full effect. At any given level of engagement (measured by Facebook) the percentage of our page's fans who we reach with a given post is roughly half what it was in 2013. For our image posts:

It also seems like it's getting worse.  Looking at our image posts with our most common levels of engagement (11%-14%) the percent of our fans we've reached has gone down steadily each month so far in 2015:

It also seems that Facebook has changed which sorts of posts get higher reach.  It used to be that images, which offer the easy opportunity for interaction through a simple click, got good reach compared to links or text posts.  Our experience in recent months has been that images have been increasingly difficult to have reach a high percentage of your fans.  Text posts, which are hard to interact with, are equally difficult to spread widely.  Links are harder to get high engagement totals on, but it appears that when you do, Facebook gives those posts signficantly broader reach.  The below post that we shared this week reached nearly 42% of our total fans, our highest total of the year, at a 14% engagement rate.

We're in good company in this picturesque piece in Palate Exposure: "Top Fifteen Wineries of Paso Robles"

Posted by Tablas Creek Vineyard on Monday, March 23, 2015

Two sorts of posts appear to be easiest to get served to those who have liked your page.  First is video.  We've posted seven videos so far this year.  They have garnered an average 10% engagement rate, and have reached an average of 22.6% of our fans: more than double the reach, on average, of our image posts with the same engagement.

The second type of post that seems to get good reach is the multi-image post, where fans are encouraged to click between the images to see the full content you've posted.  We've posted seventeen such posts this year, and they've achieved an average 16.2% engagement rate and have reached an average of 14.6% of our fans per post.  And yet this is discouraging in its own way.  We had six multi-image posts that achieved at least 19% engagement.  These posts reached, on average, 18% of our fans.  Facebook has decided that even these all-star posts, interesting enough to engage a massive 20% of the people who saw them, aren't worth serving to 82% of the people who have self-declared as your fans.

So, if you're running a Facebook page for your company or your organization, what should you do?  It seems to me you have three options, not mutually exclusive. 

1. You can continue to work to make great content, and resign yourself to the reach of this content in most cases growing smaller over time.  This has the advantage of being free, except for the opportunity costs and staff time of producing this content. Just adjust your expectations.
2. You can invest more significantly in video.  A glance at your own Facebook feed should demonstrate that Facebook is interested in serving more video to its users as it focuses on cutting into YouTube's head-start in the video arena.  These posts are typically somewhat more involved to make, but Facebook is rewarding them with greater reach.
3. Finally, you can pay to sponsor your posts.  Even at relatively modest levels, doing so gives you much greater access to your fans and to those who you target, whether they be friends of your fans or others that fit specific demographics or interests.  We've paid to promote four posts so far this year, and have had these posts served something like 5000 extra times for each $20 we've spent.  Given that our average post is reaching something like 800 of our fans organically, if we were to choose to promote one post a week, at $20/post, we might be able to double the total number of views of our content at an annual cost of around $1000.  That's hardly exorbitant. 

Sadly, I don't see Facebook making changes that allow for a return to the conditions of a few years ago, where businesses and organizations could pay to acquire new fans, or to target connections of their fans, while taking access to those fans for granted.  But given that there is no other social network that has remotely Facebook's user base, and that the changes that the company has made aren't likely to drive those users away, it's worth deciding the appropriate level of investment for your group to remain in the Facebook game.  Sure, you can -- and should -- continue to post to Twitter and Instagram, but doing so is not a replacement for engaging the 1.2 billion active monthly users on Facebook.  Just know that the era when a small businesses can treat Facebook as the centerpiece of a no-cost marketing plan is over, and it's not coming back.

Budbreak, 2015: Early, like 2014. Cue the frost alarms.

By the end of last week, we'd seen significant budbreak at the tops of our hills among early sprouting varieties like Viognier, Syrah, Grenache Blanc and (below) Grenache.

Budbreak each year starts the clock ticking on the growing season. It typically happens between mid-March and mid-April, depending on how cold the winter has been, and more specifically the dates of our last hard freezes.  Like 2014, this year saw cold weather early in the winter, but starting late January it's been unseasonably warm.  We did see temperatures drop into the high 20's in our coldest spots a couple of weeks ago, but even those nights saw our hilltops comfortably above the freezing mark.  To give you a sense of where 2015 fits within the context of recent years, I went back to look at when we first noted budbreak each of the last eight years:

2014: Mid-March
2013: First week of April
2012: Mid-April
2011: First week of April
2010: Last week of March
2009: Second week of April
2008: Last week of March
2007: First week of April

So, we're more or less on track with last year, which was our earliest-ever recorded budbreak.  Last year, because of how early things were, I wrote that we were dreading the frost season even more than normal.  And this year is no different; we can have a frost here any time until mid-May, although every frost that has caused serious damage has come in April.  But it's interesting to me to note that the two years in the last nine that have seen seriously damaging frosts (2009 and 2011) didn't come in years with unusually early budbreak.  Hopefully, that bodes well for this year. The long-term forecast doesn't show anything particularly threatening frost-wise (though it also doesn't show any prospects for significant rain).  But there's still a month at least of white-knuckle nights in store.

It's important to note that I had to trek to the top of our hill and look in specific varietal blocks to find budbreak.  None of our Mourvedre, Roussanne, or Counoise vines are out, nor are even the most precocious varietals in low-lying areas, which did see early-March freezes.  This gradient between the tops and bottoms of our hills will likely play out all the way through the growing season, as the earlier-sprouting areas will also see earlier flowering, earlier veraison, and earlier harvest.

But for now, budbreak is a hopeful thing: the beginning of a season of growth, and the beginning of our work that will come to define 2015 for us for years to come.  Please join me in welcoming the 2015 vintage to Tablas Creek.

A first look at the 2014 white blends, and a vintage assessment

This week, we put together our white blends for 2014:

Typically, our blending weeks follow a consistent pattern. We start by tasting each lot, variety by variety, and giving them grades. [For an overview of our grading system, see this post by my dad from 2012.] This initial phase gives us an overview of the vintage's strengths and weaknesses, helps point out lots that need attention in the cellar, and suggests which lots are of a quality that they should be considered for the Esprit de Tablas.  This year, the white tasting included 4 Viognier lots, 5 Grenache Blanc lots, 2 lots each of Picpoul Blanc and Marsanne, and 10 lots of Roussanne. My notes:

A good initial test of the vintage is the percentage of lots that receive our top grade (a "1" in this case). Somewhere around 40% is normal for us; this vintage I gave 13 of the 23 lots a "1" grade. The next thing I look at is what percentage of our total gallons of each grape get that top grade, which helps us know what the likely profile of our blends will be, and if there are lots whose friendliness and relative lack of depth suggest they're better suited for the Patelin than for our estate wines. This year, I gave "1" grades to 55% of our Roussanne, 72% of our Grenache Blanc, 23% of our Marsanne, 15% of our Viognier, and 100% of our Picpoul (I rated both of our lots a "1").  We did identify one Viognier lot for declassification into the Patelin Blanc.  The lineup of lots, on the bar on Monday, and below it, our flight of 5 different Grenache Blancs:

Our next step is to blend the Esprit Blanc.  We typically start from the outside and work our way in.  We tasted blends between 60% and 80% Roussanne, 20% and 40% Grenache Blanc, and 0% and 10% Picpoul.  It took us two days, but we came to the conclusion that as good as the Grenache Blanc and Picpoul were this year (and both were excellent), because of the good acidity on Roussanne -- often a low-acid grape -- we didn't need as much of the others as it might have at first appeared.  We even toyed with the idea of eliminating Picpoul entirely and focusing on the richness of Roussanne and Grenache Blanc, but in the end decided that the tropical fruitiness of Picpoul, which came through appealingly even at just 5% of the final blend, was of value to the finished wine even if the acidity was OK without it.  Our (tentatively) final Esprit Blanc blend: 72% Roussanne, 23% Grenache Blanc, and 5% Picpoul Blanc.

We then turned our focus to the Cotes Blanc, having removed from consideration the lots earmarked for the Esprit Blanc.  This is typically an easier process, because we have fewer options in front of us.  We knew at this point that because we had declassified one Viognier lot to Patelin, we weren't going to make a varietal Viognier.  So, we knew the Viognier base that would form the core of the wine.  Our questions were at that point to decide the relative proportions of the Grenache Blanc, Marsanne and Roussanne, and over two days, we decided to keep the Roussanne percentage low, both because we want the wine to be different from the Esprit, and because too much Roussanne, added to the rich Viognier base, seemed to make the wines too heavy.  In the end, our chosen blend was 42% Viognier, 30% Grenache Blanc, 23% Marsanne, and 5% Roussanne.

The blending session also made clear that we'll have some knockout varietal wines this year, in pretty decent quantities.  We decided against making a Viognier, but the Roussanne, Grenache Blanc, Marsanne, and Picpoul Blanc should all be terrific.

This was just the first of three blending weeks on our calendar.  We'll reconvene week-after-next to repeat the process with the red lots, and then welcome Francois Perrin to the vineyard two weeks after that to get his take on everything we think we've decided. But even after just one week, it's clear that the raw materials are exceptional. I asked Neil to summarize his impressions of 2014 at this point, and his answer ("a lot of depth, and great acidity") is about as good a starting point as we could want.

Celebrating a Recent Burst of Progress on Direct Shipping

It seems like progress in direct shipping goes in waves. There's a small flurry of movement, in states widely separated in geography and culture, and then a period when nothing much happens.  Then, for whatever reason, progress starts back up.

About six weeks ago I wrote a post State of the Union, Wine Shipping Edition in which I broke down the 51 shipping destinations (50 states plus the District of Columbia) into ten tiers, based on the ease and cost of doing business in each.  I could have written essentially the same article any time in the previous two years without necessitating significant changes (OK, there was one change: Montana became a shipping state in late 2013, but that was it).  Yet the six weeks since I wrote my State of the Union have seen two major developments, with a couple of others seemingly in the works.  Given that there aren't that many states still left that prohibit or severely curtail winery shipping (15, as of late January) that's a measurable blip.  Let's look at them one by one.

Cheers to Massachusetts!
We were thrilled when, late last year, the great state of Massachusetts passed a workable direct-shipping law (thanks, in part, to former New England Patriots quarterback-turned-vintner Drew Bledsoe). Although the law went into effect January 1st, 2015, it took the state a few weeks to process the flood of applications they received. But as of now, we can happily ship to residents of the Bay State, and they can sign up for our wine clubs. And after the winter they’ve had, it sounds like most of them need a drink!

A Bill Passes in South Dakota
South Dakota was until very recently one of the states with the most curious collection of wine shipping laws.  We couldn't ship wine there if we received an order, but only when someone made a purchase in-person at the winery.  And even then, the shipment was subject to the state's individual out-of-state alcohol purchase transport limit of one gallon per instance.  That's five bottles, maximum.  But just two weeks ago, the governor signed into law House Bill 1001, which sets up a straightforward shipper's permit requiring that wineries remit taxes and periodic reports, and verify the legal age of the purchaser. Pretty standard stuff, for wine shipping, and only a moderate burden to wineries.  The law will go into effect January 1st, 2016.

Progress in Indiana
Indiana is another state that throws some interesting roadblocks in between wineries who wish to sell their wares in the state and Hoosier consumers who would like to purchase them.  Right now, the state limits direct shipments to wineries who both take an initial order in-person at the winery, and don't have a relationship with a wholesaler in the state.  The state differs from South Dakota in that only the initial order must be taken in person (not every order) but the wholesaler prohibition means that it's always been a no-go for us.  In late January, the Indiana Senate passed Senate Bill 113, which would remove both the in-person requirement and the distributor prohibition, albeit at the expense of raising the winery shipping permit from $100/year to $500/year, which would make it one of the five most expensive in the country.  Still, this would count as progress.  The bill is now in committee in the Indiana House of Representatives.

Pennsylvania: Glimmers of Hope
With the passage of the direct shipping bill in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania (America's 10th-largest wine market) assumed the mantle of the largest wine market to prohibit winery-direct shipping.  But readers familiar with Pennsylvania will understand why, despite a growing in-state wine industry, there are unusually strong forces that stand in the way. Pennsylvania is one of only two states (Utah is the other) where wine sales are restricted to state-run stores, and with more than 600 stores in the state system, the combination of massive revenue that the stores direct into state coffers and the influence of the state employees' union mitigates against rapid change. Still, the prospects for change seem brighter now than at any time in my memory. The new Governor Tom Wolf went on record in February saying "I'm in favor of direct shipping". The bill, however, that passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives last week looks to have limited prospects, because it moves faster than the Senate and Governor are comfortable with in privatizing the state stores. In any case, it seems like there is at least the possibility of movement in the Keystone State, although I'm not holding my breath.

Delaware: A Bill in the Works?
Finally, one more small crack of daylight, albeit in one of the smallest states of the union. In November, Delaware House Minority Whip Deborah Hudson made winery direct shipping the focus of her weekly address, pointing out that Delaware was one of just 9 states that prohibit shipping to consumers and inviting her fellow legislators to "objectively weigh the facts and set aside the baseless fears of special interest groups, allowing our residents and Delaware wineries to join the 21st Century". Amen to that!

As always, the best place to find out what's going on in the direct shipping realm, and to learn how you can help, is Free the Grapes.