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· Tom Fairhall

Estate-Wide Social Media Onboarding: A Template for Brewery Marketing Teams

Profile setup, brand guidelines, content calendar, training workshop, and ongoing support. A complete onboarding template for brewery estates.

Estate-Wide Social Media Onboarding: A Template for Brewery Marketing Teams

Estate-Wide Social Media Onboarding: A Template for Brewery Marketing Teams

By Tom Fairhall | Pub Post Pro | April 2026

Across 884 pubs audited in 23 independent brewery estates, 80.9% score exactly 10 on presence. They have a Google Business listing and one social media profile. They are not posting regularly. Their engagement averages 3 out of 15, roughly 20% of what is achievable.

This is not a mystery. Most of these pubs have never been onboarded onto a social media programme. They set up a Facebook page when they took over, posted three times in the first month, and then the demands of actually running a pub took over. No one at the brewery followed up. No one provided a template, a schedule, or a reason to keep going.

The presence data shows a clear cliff: 81% of pubs at score 10, then a drop to 16% at score 7, and only 7 pubs (0.8%) at score 13, a full, active suite of profiles. Those 7 pubs all belong to Harvey's Brewery, and they got there through individual landlord initiative, not estate support.

This template is designed to change that. It is a complete onboarding programme for brewery marketing teams. Five phases move a newly installed landlord from "no social media plan" to "posting consistently with the right brand assets, on the right platforms, in the right way."

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to move the estate average from score 10 to score 13 on presence, and from 3 to 9 on engagement. That is achievable with structure and follow-through, and it would make a measurable difference to the digital visibility of every pub in the portfolio.

Why Most Brewery Onboarding Misses the Social Media Problem

Most brewery onboarding programmes are focused on the operational essentials: cellar management, draught quality, the tenancy agreement, health and safety, the beer range. All of this is necessary and right. The problem is that social media is treated as an afterthought. "Here is the Facebook page password" comes at the end of a long day, rather than as a core part of getting the pub trading properly.

The data reflects this exactly. Operational fundamentals like Google rating (average 79.5% of max) and review volume (71.2% of max) suggest that pub basics are being maintained. Pubs are open, they serve decent beer, customers leave reviews. But the active layer of digital marketing (posting, content, engagement) is collapsing at 20% of maximum.

The gap between a pub that is open and decent and a pub that people actively talk about, share posts from, and book tables at is almost entirely a social media problem. Solving it at onboarding (before bad habits are set) is far easier than retrofitting it six months into a tenancy.

Phase 1: Profile Setup Checklist

This phase happens before the landlord takes over, or in the first week of trading. It should be completed by the brewery marketing team in consultation with the incoming landlord, not left to the landlord to figure out alone.

The goal: every pub in the estate has a complete, verified, consistent set of social profiles before it opens its doors.

Google Business Profile

Facebook Business Page

Instagram Account

Website

Target outcome after Phase 1: A presence score of 13 out of 15, the benchmark currently achieved by only 7 pubs in 884.

Phase 2: Brand Guidelines Package

The most common reason landlords post inconsistently is that accessing the right assets is more effort than it is worth. If finding the correct logo requires emailing the brewery and waiting two days, most landlords will skip the logo and post something improvised, or not post at all.

The brand guidelines package solves this by placing everything in one accessible location before the landlord starts trading.

What the Package Should Contain

Logo files.

Colour palette. Photography style guide. Tone of voice guidance. Social media policy (see Section below).

Access to the shared asset library: A Google Drive or Dropbox link containing all of the above, plus any seasonal graphics (Christmas, bank holidays, local events) produced centrally.

All of this should fit in a single folder and take a landlord under 10 minutes to navigate. If it takes longer than that, simplify it.

Brewery training session
Brewery training session

Phase 3: Content Calendar Template

The content calendar template is the most practically useful tool in this entire programme. It solves the blank-page problem that stops most landlords from posting.

How the Template Works

The template assigns a content category to each week of the month, with two or three specific post prompts per category. It does not write the posts. It tells the landlord what to post about.

A four-week monthly structure:

Week 1: Community. Post about something that connects the pub to the local area. A charity the pub is supporting. A village event happening nearby. A shout-out to the local sports team. Content that positions the pub as part of the community, not just a business in it.

Suggested prompts:

Week 2: The Team. A photo of the staff. A welcome to a new member. A birthday mention. Content that shows there are real people behind the bar who know their regulars.

Suggested prompts:

Week 3: Food and Drink. The week's specials. A new cask. Sunday roast messaging. The most visually compelling content the pub can produce.

Suggested prompts:

Week 4: Events and Upcoming. Whatever is happening next month. Quiz night reminder. Live music announcement. Anything bookable or worth marking in a calendar.

Suggested prompts:

A landlord following this template and posting once per week (four posts per month) moves from the industry engagement average of 3 out of 15 to a score of approximately 8 or 9. Applied across an estate of 50 pubs, that single shift would transform aggregate digital health scores across the board.

Phase 4: Training Session Outline

The onboarding training session should be practical, not conceptual. Most landlords do not need to understand social media strategy. They need enough confidence to take a photo and write a caption without worrying about doing it wrong.

A 90-minute session covers everything required. It can be delivered in person (ideal), via video call (acceptable), or as a recorded video combined with a printed one-pager (minimum viable).

Session Structure

First 15 minutes: Why this matters. Walk the landlord through what the data shows: pubs that post consistently see more walk-in customers, more bookings, and more review activity. Keep this brief. Most landlords accept the premise easily; they just lack the structure to act on it.

Next 20 minutes: Platform walkthrough. Open Facebook on a phone and show the landlord how to create a post, upload a photo, and create an Event. Then show the same on Instagram. This should be done on their actual phone, on their actual accounts. Generic screenshots are less useful than live practice.

Next 20 minutes: Content calendar in practice. Walk through the monthly template. Show the landlord where the brand assets are. Ask them to write a practice post for Week 1 (Community) and show it to you. Give specific, positive feedback. This is the most important 20 minutes in the session.

Next 15 minutes: Handling reviews and comments. Show how to respond to a Google review (positive and negative). Cover the tone of voice guidance. Role-play a negative review response using a fictional example. Explain who to contact at the brewery if a review escalates beyond what they are comfortable handling.

Final 20 minutes: Questions and first post. Answer any questions. Before the session ends, ask the landlord to post something (anything) on their Facebook page using what they have just practised. Getting the first post done in the room eliminates the barrier of "I'll do it later."

Phase 5: Ongoing Support Structure

Onboarding solves the starting problem. The ongoing support structure solves the sustaining problem.

Most landlords post consistently in the first few weeks after training. By month two or three, the habit drops unless there is a mechanism that maintains accountability.

Monthly Check-In Call

A 20-minute call, monthly, between the brewery marketing contact and the landlord. The call covers three things:

  1. Review the previous month: what was posted, what performed well, any issues.
  2. Confirm the content calendar for the coming month: any key dates, local events, upcoming food or beer changes to post about.
  3. One specific focus for the month: building review count, promoting an upcoming event, introducing a new menu.
The call is not a performance review. It is a support conversation. The tone should be collaborative, not supervisory. Landlords who feel supported post more than landlords who feel monitored.

Shared Asset Library (Ongoing)

The brand asset library should be maintained with seasonal graphics: Christmas countdown posts, summer bank holiday messaging, St George's Day, St David's Day for Welsh estates, Valentine's Day booking prompts. These are quick wins that reduce the creative burden on individual landlords and maintain visual consistency across the estate.

Best-of-Estate Sharing

Once per quarter, the marketing team should identify the three or four strongest social posts from across the estate and share them (with attribution) in a WhatsApp group or email newsletter for landlords. This serves two purposes: it celebrates the landlords doing it well, and it provides concrete examples to those who are still finding their feet.

Sample Social Media Policy for Tenanted Pubs

The policy should be a single page. Long policies are not read. The following covers what is needed.

[Brewery Name] Social Media Policy for Tenanted Pubs

We want every pub in our estate to have an active, positive social media presence. This policy sets out the minimum expectations and the support available to you.

Minimum standards:

Content guidelines: In the event of a negative review or complaint: Support available to you:

The Outcome: From 10 to 13

The presence cliff at score 10 is not a natural state. It is a product of incomplete onboarding and absent support. Eighty percent of pubs stopped at the point where they had the basic platforms but no structure for using them.

This five-phase programme moves a pub from score 10 to score 13 on presence, adding the missing platforms and activating the ones that already exist. It moves engagement from the industry average of 3 to something approaching 8 or 9, through consistent posting guided by the content calendar.

No individual phase is complicated. The complexity is in doing all five, in order, before the landlord gets too deep into the daily grind of trading to engage with it.

Onboarding is the cheapest and most impactful marketing investment a brewery can make in its estate. The cost is a folder of assets, a 90-minute training session, and a 20-minute monthly call. The return is an estate that shows up consistently online: visible to local customers, discoverable on Google, and recognisably part of a professional brewing family.

Further Reading:

Tom Fairhall is the founder of Pub Post Pro, a done-for-you social media service for independent pubs and brewery estates across the UK.

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