The Drew Blog

Beers that Twitter

Drew Neisser

Woke up this morning to discover that Corona Summerbration was now following me on Twitter. Since I don’t recall tweeting about beer or Corona or summer, I can’t figure out what I did to deserve this honor. Sure I love an icy cold one as much as the next guy, but I’m hardly in Corona’s prime demo which incidentally is the slowest to embrace Twitter. Perhaps Corona is hoping I’m an “influencer” and simply by blogging about the brand here I’ve rewarded their faith in me. Regardless, this made curious about other beer brands that Twitter so I put together the following round up:

Beers that Twitter:

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the craft beers tend to lead the way having the most loyal and engaged fan base. These seem to be manned by real people who like talking about beer and the craft of beer making. The big brands either don’t bother to have a voice or it’s so forced like Michelob’s that it is actually off-putting. Given that Twitter hasn’t taken off among 21-29 year old males yet, these bigger brands aren’t necessarily missing out…yet. Also, many of these brands like Bud and Coors have done an admirable job building up and engaging their fan bases on other social media like Facebook and MySpace.

Before I wrap up, I wanted to raise the issue of brands following people. Personally, I’m still a little startled when a brand and not a person elects to follow me on Twitter. Some of the beer brands listed above have been aggressive in this area. For example, Epic follows 2109, Edison follows 1997 and Michelob follows 1097. This activity has driven up their follower numbers but in doing so also diminishes the power of their fan base. More impressive are the brands like Goose Island and Breckenridge Brewery who only follow 5 and 53 respectively yet have hundreds of followers.

Bottom line: Twitter is an opportunity for brands to engage with people as if they were people. To do this well requires the brands to behave like real friends not aggressive pitch men. If a brand elects to follow someone, it should have a good reason, a basis for introduction and not drop in out of nowhere like an uninvited guest. Just like people who tweet, brands should avoid becoming a Twitcher or Twitter Whore by maintaining a healthy following to followers ratio. Cheers.

UPDATE 6/15: @coors_light is not run by the folks at Coors so I took it off the list. See comment from the company below. Also, Molson is taking a multi-tweet approach with the following major brand tweeters:

UPDATE 7/13: Got some leads on microbrewers that tweet – and boy, do they ever!