Social media is taking over as the recognized way to spread the word about your brand and its products. Today it is essential to have an online component to your marketing efforts and sites like Facebook and Twitter are some the hottest spaces available. The wine industry has been one of the fields to take the most advantage of the new platforms. In fact, wineries have an online presence rivaling anything they have ever tried before.

A slide show available from Slideshare.net, featuring research by ABLE social media marketing has provided us with some interesting details about how prominent social marketing has become in the wine industry and the amazing results the efforts have yielded.

To get things rolling take a look a this chart revealing how many wineries are on Twitter and Facebook. The study focused on France and the United States, but I am limiting my discussion to the United States only for now.

Here’s the same information for Fickr and YouTube:

Half of the wineries form the survey have more than 500 fans on Facebook and well over a third have at least 500 followers on Twitter. The survey creators wondered what contributed to wineries having many fans. The answer? Almost half of them have dedicated marketing managers that create and promote advertising on social media platforms.

About 30% are using Facebook ads for promotion and 47% of them say the ads actually do attract business. 28% of the wineries report that Twitter helped draw in some new business. Both platforms scored in the mid 60% range for engaging customers in a winery brand. Facebook ads resulted in people visiting the winery in 58% of cases and Twitter did the same in 45% of the cases.

So we can see that social media is having a dramatic impact on wine drinkers. Almost three quarters of wineries say they plan to have more activity on social media platforms and the half that currently has no presence on Facebook says they do plan on breaking into social media in 2012.