How a family pub in Fitzroy went from 35,000 to 300,000+ organic views a month.

St Andrews Hotel is a family-run pub in Fitzroy with a couple of thousand followers when we started. Within months of going video-first, the account was doing over 300,000 organic views a month, several videos passed 200,000 views, one passed 5 million, and a Sunday roast we launched purely on social filled the venue every week at its peak. Total ad spend: zero. Here's how it actually happened.

Where it started

St Andrews was my first individual social media client, and I had an unfair advantage: I used to work there. Before I was a social media guy I was a hospitality guy, and I'd stood behind that bar. I knew the family that ran it, the regulars, the in-jokes, the culture inside those walls. So when the owners couldn't always put into words who the pub was, it didn't matter. I'd witnessed it. My job was just to take what I'd seen inside and put it online.

That's the first lesson, and it's the one I now start every client relationship with: know exactly who you are. Not a mission statement. The quirks, the stories, the family element, the stuff that makes people loyal to you in real life. That's where the character in your content comes from, and character is what people follow.

The first viral video

Our first video to take off crossed 80,000 views. Looking back that's a modest number, but for an account with a couple of thousand followers it was massive, and it was the "oh, this is real" moment for everyone involved. The reach didn't come from the follower count. It came from the way short-form video works now: the feed is an endless scroll shown to people who don't follow you yet, and the right video can reach an audience a local pub could never have dreamed of buying.

From there we got consistent videos around the 100,000 mark, a couple in the 200,000 to 300,000 range, and eventually one over 5 million views. Every one of them organic.

Views are nice. Bums on seats are the point.

The number I'm actually proudest of isn't a view count. We launched a Sunday roast purely through social content, no paid promotion of any kind, and at its peak it filled the venue every single week. That's the part most social media case studies skip: the whole exercise only matters if attention turns into customers. Views were the mechanism. The roast bookings were the result.

What any venue can copy from this

• Lead with people, not product. The pub's best content was never a beautifully lit parma. It was the people and the feeling of the place. Product shots tell people what you sell, character tells them why they should come to you specifically.
• Let one video do one job. Some videos exist to reach strangers, some exist to build trust with people who've seen you before. Expecting one video to do both is how accounts get stuck.
• Consistency beats intensity. This wasn't fifty videos a month. It was a sustainable rhythm of good ones, kept up long enough for the compounding to kick in.

You can see this work, and the rest of the portfolio, on the Work page.