Social media expert's posting playbook for bars and restaurants

We just wanted to take a beat here in the first edition of 2023 to say thanks to all of you for reading. Five editions in, it feels like we're hitting our stride!

We're looking forward to a great year of providing you expert insights, important headlines from around the industry, and one-of-a-kind beer and beverage data each and every week.

- The Brave New Bar team

In this week's interview marketing expert David Hayden of Hospitality Formula Consulting and Up - Down Arcade Bars tells us what bars and restaurants must do for social media success.

Key takeaways:

1. Facebook fans don't matter anymore. That number is just a vanity metric, so stop caring about it. Instead, focus on driving post engagement.
2. David's proven social media posting schedule: Post on social Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and put $10/day behind that Thursday post starting 5pm Thursday and wrapping up 6pm Saturday. This will get you to be consistent and will also get you practice. You'll also find success.
3. You can't overstate the importance of a consistent brand voice. If your brand were a person, what music would they like? If you don't know the answer, then you need to focus on nailing that down before anything else. (Get how-to tips for this by clicking below.)

Every year searches go up across BeerMenus.com in the leadup to NYE, and this year was no exception.

But this year there was a discernible pattern in the beers people were looking for: they wanted domestics.

Six of the highest trending beers on BeerMenus.com in the last week were domestics, which usually is not the case. Here's the list of those six beers and how searches for them increased compared to the previous week:

• Landshark Lager: 120% increase
• Bud Light: 95% increase
• Natural Light Naturdays: 87% increase
• Old Milwaukee: 76% increase
• Busch Light: 73% increase
• Miller Lite: 73% increase

Why domestics? It's impossible to know for sure. But speaking from experience it's a lot easier to be drinking Miller Lites all night long than some hazy double IPA, both in terms of being able to stomach it and being able to afford it.

The takehome? If you don't carry some of these domestics, consider it. If you do carry them, then make sure you're telling the world you have them. Thousands of beer drinkers are actively looking for them, even though they're beers you can get basically everywhere. You might as well show up when folks go searching for these beers.

• Beer distributors are pessimistic about expected beer demand in early 2023.
• NPR's Planet Money wrote about the growing NA beverage market.
• A popular Philadelphia brewery banned kids after 2pm in the smaller (450 square feet) of its two taprooms. Customers were happy.