Adam and Wendy Leidhecker should write a manual on how to leverage online social media networks for business. Over the last year and a half, the Williamsport couple has built a following for their online startup, Paw Luxury, through deft use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media.
Their company, which sells eco-friendly dog products, recently won Twitter’s Shorty Award in the business category for providing the best short content. They will receive the award on Feb. 11 at the Shorty Awards Ceremony in New York.
Adam Leidhecker says Paw Luxury has about 12,000 followers on Twitter. As their followers have grown, so has business.
“Probably 80 percent of our sales over the last year have come from Twitter,” he says. “But we don’t advertise on Twitter, we don’t list products. What we do is connect, answer questions. We’re open and honest. There is definitely Twitter best practices; people can sense if you’re trying to spam them or look at them as a dollar figure.”
The key is to provide useful content. “It’s about engaging, not just about putting your products out there with a link,” says Leidhecker. “The Shorty Awards are about producing good content, and the fact that we won means our followers and customers are finding that our Tweets are valuable and are actually helping them.”
The Leidheckers started with a physical storefront in Montoursville before launching the Web site and moving their entire operation online, where they have been able to create a Web-based community for dog lovers.
The couple’s own dog, a boxer named Lola, is something of a persona on the store’s Web site and blog (for instance, the site has an “ask Lola” section where visitors to the site can send in dog-related questions).
But ultimately, Leidhecker insists the key to Paw Luxury’s online success has been a dedication to engagement and customer service.
“We are a customer service company that happens to sell dog products,” he says. “Our advertising budget is zero. It’s time, really. We put a lot of time into it. We try to connect with pet people.”
In the coming months, the Leidheckers hope to expand their Web site to include cat products, and also to begin daily and weekly video podcasts on their YouTube channel. “We want to make pawlux.com more than a store; we want to make it a resource for all dog and pet owners, and we want to keep educating and expanding.”
Source: Adam Leidhecker, co-founder of Paw Luxury
Writer: John Davidson
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