Twitter is a great social media tool that has several benefits when it comes to the wine world. It also has a few drawbacks. I’ve taken part in worldwide tastings of different wines. For example at a designated time on a designated day, people taste a particular wine and tweet about it. Twitter is a great platform for bringing people together as there were tweets from around the world about the type of wine. Recently I participated on a chat about wine regions to visit. Several others participated in the hour-long event on Twitter. This chat helped develop a sense of community even though the participants were miles apart.

I was surprised to see a tweet today that asked wineries to tweet them an event or info about a wine and they would retweet to millions. Well this is theoretically true however rather ambitious on their part. Many people use an application such as Tweetdeck to view tweets. Depending on how popular a hashtag or group is, a tweet can remain on the screen for seconds to days. If one follows the hashtag #wine a tweet that appears on the screen will remain there for only seconds as other tweets follow. I can scroll and read previous tweets however the scrolling may only cover a range of minutes in popular areas such as All Friends, #wine and #travel. On the other hand, categories such as #winery and #vineyard do not have as many tweets and a tweet may stay on the screen for hours or days.

It is true that a winery event or information about a wine can be retweeted to millions. However there is a good chance that millions will never see that tweet.

Cheers,
Terry