This is the second in a series of blog posts called #SocialSuccess. Each month we will catch up with a local business in the Tri-States (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area) and interview them about how they use social media to grow their business. For February, we caught up with Dawn Marie Dillon, owner of Breathless Beauty Organic Vegan & Natural Market in Milford, Pennsylvania. You can find Breathless Beauty on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, WordPress, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Here we go:
Question: Tell me about Breathless Beauty, Organic, Vegan & Natural Market – what area does it serve, what types of products and services does it provide, when did you launch it?
Answer: We are a full-service health food store which now has an organic raw live juice bar and cafe in it. We have a health coach and a certified herbalist on site each day as well. We also make our own line of herbal vegan bath and body care. We opened our doors on Nov. 18, 2010.
Q: How many different mediums do you use to market your business? For example: direct mail, print advertising, online advertising, radio, TV, social media, and which are the most successful?
A: We mainly use social media sites as well as print flyers and menus to hand out around town. Occasionally, we do run ads in the Pike County Courier [weekly] paper.
Q: Which social networks are your business on?
A: We are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, WordPress, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Q: What are your goals in using social media?
A: We want to first and foremost educate our followers on health and well-being naturally. Then, we focus on sales and increasing customer loyalty and our brand awareness.
Q: You mentioned that you used to work on Wall Street. What did you do there, and how did that experience help with social media for your business?
A: I was the admin for the health and science team at a company called Financial Dynamics. This helped me in knowing what to say and how to capture my audience on social media.
Q: What types of content do you include on your different social media channels? Which posts have been the most successful in terms of engagement (likes, shares and comments?) Can you provide examples?
A: We include all types of content — pictures, other blogs, we share health info from other sites, etc. The posts we find most success with are usually the ones where we ask a question, run a promotion, or link our most recent blog post. For example, once we started making a product called “Sister’s Pops,” we blogged about it, and we were getting tons of private party order requests directly on our website.
Q: Do you use the same content across all social networks? Can you provide an example(s)?
A: Yes and no. Sometimes we will post about Tumeric on Facebook and blog about something else. Sometimes we will cross-post if we think it would make sense, but sometimes we like to change it up. However, we always try to ask that they follow us on all social media sites so they can get the best of all worlds.
Q: How many people are involved with social media at your business, both in terms of content creation and responding to comments?
A: Basically, it is just me and my husband Nick. However, our 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth is now getting more involved to help us gain more likes and use hashtags and the such. She is also great at perfecting and editing images.
Q: Has Breathless Beauty tried out Facebook ads?
A: We tried the ads before as it states we can gain x amount of more likes/followers, etc. We paid $10 per day for a week, and we saw that we had only four new likes. This was discouraging as I can alone get more likes each day by sharing my page on various other social media outlets as well as share my status.
Q: What advice would you give to other small businesses when starting on social media or how to improve their social media?
A: I think consistency is the key, and lots of pictures. Let all know you are a real person and not just a business. You must post even in the slow season. I try to post minimum three times a day.
Sohn Social Media Solutions, based in Shohola, Pennsylvania, provides social media training, content creation, search engine optimization, website development and design services, and more to small businesses in the Tri-States area (New York, New Jersey Pennsylvania. We’re local, and we get the job done! Visit http://www.SohnSocialMediaSolutions.com for more information, or call Tim at (570) 559-7224.
