Kelham Wine Bar
A neighbourhood bar's social media, with a reason behind every post.
KWB Neighbourhood Bar had already handed its socials to a marketer, and it hadn't worked out. Ruth, who owns the bar, asked me to take it on. Each month I plan the content, shoot the photography, make the images and schedule the posts.
Bar / Hospitality
Social Media
Content Planning
Photography
Social Images
Scheduling
Grow
Creative Support
Where we started
Burnt once, and careful about doing it again.
KWB Neighbourhood Bar sits at the heart of the community in Kelham Island, and Ruth owns it. Ruth and I knew each other from working together before, so the conversation started from a place of trust.
Hospitality social media is crowded. Most bars in the city are posting to the same people, and a lot of the accounts end up looking alike: a drinks shot, a plate of food, a caption saying book now. For a bar built around its community, the feed needed to look like the place people actually walk into.
It didn't. The accounts had been run with no structure, just posts going out for the sake of posting. The food images were AI generated, not photographs of what the kitchen makes. Changes were made and posts published without consulting the people at the bar.
The decision
A job for every post.
The obvious move was to post more. More frequency, more nice pictures, more of the same. It's the standard advice, and it's how an account ends up full of images with nothing to say.
The people looking at a bar's feed are usually deciding where to go on Friday. They want to know what the place is like, what's on and whether it's right for them. AI food images fill a grid quickly. Nobody walks into a neighbourhood bar to be served a dish that doesn't exist.
So I built the content around a small set of content pillars, each with a clear purpose, and planned a month at a time. If a post didn't have a job to do, it didn't go out. The food and drink in every photograph is the real thing, in the real room.
That also changed the photography. Once the plan exists, I arrange a visit to the bar and shoot everything in it in one batch, which covers two to three months of images. It's a big part of why the feed now looks like the bar.
What we made
Plan. Photograph. Design. Schedule.
Every month starts with the plan: what goes out, when, and why, built around the content pillars.
Then the photography. I go on site and shoot the food and drink in batches, so one visit covers two to three months of images. The photographs are of the real thing in the real room, and the social images are designed to sit alongside them so the feed holds together.
Everything is scheduled in advance, so the posts go out on time and the team can get on with running the bar.
What changed
A feed with a plan behind it.
Over the last 90 days, KWB's content was viewed 17,000 times by 7,100 people across Facebook and Instagram, up 369% on the 90 days before. The most-watched post was a short video helping people find the bar, and it picked up over 6,000 views on its own. Followers grew by 14 over the same period, which is 56% more than in the previous 90 days.
KWB now has one person handling the plan, the photography, the images and the scheduling, and a feed that looks like the bar. Ruth trusts me to get on with it.
17K
Views in 90 days, up 369%
7.1K
People reached
6,085
Views on the most-watched post
Paid for social media that didn't do anything?
If you've been through that once, it's reasonable to be careful about doing it again. A clarity call is a free 30 minute conversation about what's gone wrong and what a plan could look like. No pitch.