Promoting ratebeer

I am giving Untappd a try given the current wonky state of Ratebeer and my worry that our partial owners are trying to devalue the site massively. I appreciate that I am new to recording beers and places on Untappd but, I may be biased here, I find the functionality of bringing beers and places together pretty disjointed. Some beers I tried to rate on there had at least 4 entries, all seemingly the same beer and this goes for places too, they appear to have used a Google dump of local places and you can get 3 or 4 offerings of the same place. Living in the sticks, well not that much, but there is 1 verified place within 20 miles radius and that is in Leamington Spa.
The stats are basically not worth bothering with and you can keep the badges as they are more of an annoyance rather than a benefit, no Forums that I can find, difficult to discover friends on there.

I was going to upload my ratings from Ratebeer to there as back up but I now can’t see the point, I will give it another week but I may end up just using it as a reference point. I got really fed up in the end for having to add loads of beers when the general belief is that they are ahead of us in this regard.
It looked to me that Untappd is a bit of a mess outside the main population areas and we can outdo them in quality of data throughout.

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My limited inspection of Untappd, left me disappointed in terms of reviews maybe due to the word limit or just the clientele. But judging by comments on this thread they are at least trying to promote the site in local markets, whereas RB seems inert.

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The main reason I use Untappd is for work friends. I don’t want them on here because I don’t want them to know how much of an alcoholic I am. I can then rate 1 or 2 beers every time I go out and look like a moderate. :slight_smile:

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For me the only benefit of Untappd is that I can see what beers are on at local pubs and know where to head to on a lunchtime. Incidentally there used to be a group of 7 of us who went to the pub but that’s down to three. Since joint RB I’ve been going on my own so the lager drinkers don’t slow me down. Have managed a couple of three pub lunchtimes.

But as to promotion, does Ratebeer even do any? I only discovered it via google searches when I was looking for places to drink when away. And as mentioned above, the Places function should be treated as a strength not as a embarrassing relative left in the attic.

This biggest promotion we have had over the years was the annual beer awards which used to get pretty wide coverage, surprisingly so.
This years awards has been a bit of a fiasco as Joet used to let local Admins sift out the rubbish and get a nice clean set of results, he only played lip service to that this year, ignored our pleas and put out a load of bollocks which was widely treated as a joke and our stock has slipped further, another example of the ABInbev influence unfortunately.

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If each of us tried to get a beer drinking friend or acquaintance to join (I am sure most of us have already given this a go), it might increase the UK membership a little, and you would have to hope they stayed, got interested and introduced another person, etc, etc.

We will have to do something or we’ll be a gang of four in the not too distant future.

<*))))))><

Just drinking a Heaney Farmhouse Beer and clicked on their website

http://www.heaneyfarmhousebrewing.com/#heaneycountrycraftbeer

Front and centre on their home page “RateBeer Best New Brewery, Northern Ireland”, very good beer too.

I’ve got one friend onto RB … Wingman_Willis.

He, as you probably know, focuses on places and ticks beers as opposed to rating them.

A few other friends use and appreciate RB for places when planning trips away, however they can’t be bothered rating and already use Untappd for the simple tick purpose.

Make that 2 ! Simon_47574 who does rate and has past 1K rates.

Long post alert. Ratebeer’s lack of promotion anywhere has led to concentrated Facebook groups popping up that are so large they are now the go-to place for UK beer drinkers and Ratebeer has no unique selling points to attract anyone over (unless they’re interested in writing ratings - and most aren’t).


The ‘problem’ specifically in the UK is the concentration of where most the beer drinkers hang out. Unlike the US and other countries beer communities which seem to be spread out over Ratebeer, BeerAdvocate, Reddit, and Facebook, UK users are almost entirely on Facebook and have minuscule communities elsewhere.

I appreciate not all of you like to use Facebook, I don’t really like it myself but I go there almost exclusively for beer purposes now. For those who don’t know, there are two major UK beer related groups there, in the UKCBF we have 14k craft beer lovers, while the similarly sized CAMRA group has 15k real ale lovers. That’s almost 30k of us (some overlap I know) who mostly can’t be arsed with RB for one reason or another. I don’t know about the CAMRA group as they, at least on the surface I have to say, seem to be predominantly older men who don’t even use UT much, let alone RB.
But in UKCBF almost everyone uses UT, there are sometimes big threads where new users will share their usernames and add each other, I’ve made a lot of contacts that way, many have made friends through UKCBF and meet up at pubs and festivals, drink and rate together on UT. So the combination of the group itself and UT covers the social aspect for most people in this way.

So why the hell would they bother with RB? Would they come for Places if not to write reviews? Nope. Facebook’s recommendation feature means that for any city someone might travel to other users have already recommended all the great breweries, pubs etc. all handily displayed on a fully functional map. Would they come for beer recommendations? Nope. Every day people are posting photos and reviews of great beers they’ve had, sharing announcements of new beers from breweries all over the country.

Another problem is that UKCBF is massively anti-macro, a viewpoint which I now share, and when news broke of ABInBev’s investment in RB people had even less desire to come here. Nowadays the only time I see RB mentioned there is when someone is travelling some obscure city/country that nobody knows about so we link to the Places page for it, or if someone asks about online shops I’ll link my bottleshop threads and encourage participation but they never do, they just bookmark it and don’t bother actually joining the forums.

One other area that formerly used to be a great promotion tool that @imdownthepub mentioned was the annual RB awards, and indeed those were quite heavily discussed in UKCBF this year but a large part of it were jokes around people’s surprise that ABInBev didn’t choose their own brands to feature there, there was also legitimate confusion from some users who seemed to be under the impression that RB admins choose the winners, and didn’t realise it was actually based on user ratings. So I completely agree that joe did RB a disservice this year by not promoting or communicating them properly, not just on RB but outside of it too. Also, you had massive brewers like Mikkeller with huge social reach making a mockery of the awards by photoshopping in ABI brands as the winners. It’s clear RB is no longer taken that seriously any more when the mockery is coming from not only random people but famous brewers, RB has lost a lot of respect it once commanded.

I don’t know. Joe and the team has an enormous upward struggle to regain trust and actually do some promotion. The lack of development and the lack of communication appear to be the biggest problems. Something, anything, needs to be done. Bugs need to be fixed. Features need to be improved. That all needs to happen before RB can even think about promotion. The future is not looking very bright at all, yet I sincerely hope Joe can turn things around because I don’t want this site to die. I still enjoy rating beers here.

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I left ukcbf because I once posted a picture of my pint of Cask ale which many craft brewers liked. However an admin removed it because cask isn’t craft apparently. I left that group a few minutes later. Twats.

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Really? They’re quite pro cask there actually, whenever someone recommends a place with well kept craft cask and sometimes even traditional stuff it attracts a ton of likes. The only reason an admin would have removed it is if you didn’t post tasting notes after being asked, or if it was owned by a macro.

It got lots of likes and it was a Bathams Bitter, you can’t get more Micro than that. I posted how it was one of my favourite beers in the world.

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Well I wouldn’t call it comprehensive, but it became relevant. When traveling I make sure to check area I’m visiting on untappd. Have to say I don’t get any requests to follow nearby venues, and I’ve turned notifications off except for one bar.

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A new venue in Nottingham The Overdraught has just forked out £400 or so to be a verified Untappd venue. Surely Ratebeer is missing a trick here, given its places database.? The above is a Totally Tapped outlet with excellent guest ales in Canning Circus. So check it out on your travels.

Yeah, it’s OK for finding out what’s on at (some) places that are near where you happen to be at the time. Provided they’re verified venues. It’s no help in finding places that are not verified venues near you, or for planning visits to more distant locations, at all. Unless there’s some functionality that I’ve missed. And as there are no reveiws or scores for places you can tell nothing about them from Untappd apart from what beers they mght have on - if the verfied venue keeps their list properly updated, which not all do. In fact, if more places were verified venues it would, paradoxically, become less useful for anything other than checking out beer lists in your immediate vicinity because there’d be just too much noise. And, if I’m in the immediate vicinity I might as well just stick my head through the door to see what they have anyway.

So, all in all, I stand by my view that Untappd doesn’t have a great offering for venues.

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If you’re in a city you don’t know it would be a pretty handy way of finding places with a decent beer selection nearby. I imagine a lot of people don’t plan their beer tourism in intense detail ahead of time.

Maybe not. In intense detail anyway. But, as far as I can see, Untappd doesn’t help with doing ANY planning ahead of time. I’d imagine most people would want to get at least a rough idea of what the top places are before visiting a new city.

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Once again I have to disagree. Yeah, RB can give you more places with scores but due to the low number of ratings and fake/old ratings usability is somewhat limited.

So I have to open and check web/Fb of each place to check what it really offers. And if they have untappd menu I can get pretty good sense of quality of beer served at that place. Even if it’s not a verified venue I can see which beers are checked in that venue.

I usually make quite detailed plans which include maps with dozens, sometimes hundreds of places. I almost never use untappd to find bars near me since I have them on offline maps, I just check if bars I already know of have something on the menu which makes them worth visiting.

It’s not the word limit on Untappd that makes it disappointing for reviews, it’s that there is no requirement to enter even a couple of words as description. I guess they fear that such a requirement would push some users away. The option to enter a brief review (or select key descriptors) is there though, and some of us usually do it.