Beer journalism on social media: Draft Magazine’s Erika Rietz
By Christopher Crosby
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Founded at a major beer festival in 2006, Draft Magazine ranks among the country’s most successful beer publications. , it features the hallmarks of classic magazine writing — compelling writing illuminated by crisp photos — and has carved a niche for itself compiling trendy features with analysis on the news of the day.
The bi-monthly magazine also boasts a social media presence that balances two pragmatic impulses for a print magazine in a digital word: the need to charge for premium content while fostering a unique online conversation. To that end, founder and editor-in-chief Erika Rietz says social media plays second-fiddle to their print product.
A secondary, but crucial role. Twitter followers, some seventy-thousand — the second most among beer magazines — drives online traffic to the website, Rietz said.
“At [the time we started the website] people weren’t even using the website, it was a place holder for contact information,” Rietz said.
“When social media came it was really just trial and error. I know now there’s science to it, but by and large it’s been an excellent thing in sharing content and getting feedback. It’s a back and forth that didn’t exist with print.”
Between issues, Rietz and a small editiorial team post links to web-only stories designed to engage a measurably younger audience in the hopes they’ll pick up a very different print issue once it hits shelves. A few times a week — usually Thursday and Fridays — various people on staff will update the Twitter feed, staggering posts throughout the day.
Facebook, on the other hand, is updated less frequently because users can be turned off by an “overkill” effect.
“You don’t [always] want to show up on someones newsfeed…You can lose followers by posting too much.”
Instagram is a different matter; the in-house photographer runs the page, featuring close-up shots of beer, hops, and other photogenic stars of craft beer. With 28,000 followers, it ranks among beers most popular.
Online, Rietz can test original content for the magazine. If a story posted to Facebook generates enough conversation, they’ll post it to Twitter — something they don’t automatically do — and see if it’s re-tweeted. Cross-platform success is an indication of wide-appeal, but success doesn’t guarantee a slot: print and online audiences are different, Rietz says, and what’s popular with one won’t necessarily be with the other.
Though each platform brings a separate audience, they’re unified by an interest in craft beer, Rietz says. While Facebook users are look for listicles — “They want Top-Ten articles so they can comment on the ones you left out,” — print has a different objective.
“In print, we’re looking for something that doesn’t draw that kind of reaction,” she said. “[It’s] useful for thinking, sitting and marinading on a topic. Everything’s going shorter, so we don’t do a whole lot of long form in print [anymore].”
But there’s no hard-fast rule: “I think that the shorter, sharable content will do well on social, but some of the pieces that have done well have been thoughtful, longer.”