We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ellen Matis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ellen below.

Ellen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

In 2022, we made a major shift in business to focus our efforts entirely on social media marketing for tourism-centric businesses and organizations. This meant working with destination marketing organizations, like tourism bureaus; but it also meant working with experience-driven businesses.

During this transition, we launched the Hello Social Co. Creator Network — a platform for brands to engage with content creators in the tourism niche. It was the first time that we took our business outside of solely providing services and started offering an online-based platform like this.

One of the riskiest things we did as part of the major transition with clients was part ways with a lot of long-term clients that no longer fit within our niche. We took a huge annual hit in revenue as a result, and that wasn’t easy to navigate.

Overall though, taking the risk was worth it — it took a while to get our finances back in order after such a big shift, but now that we’re there, the entire team is really aligned on the work that we’re putting out into the world.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started working in social media marketing when it was still a very new career path. I got my first job as a social media intern when I was in college almost accidentally. At that point, I had never considered social media as a full-time career, I just knew (and some of my professors seemed to know) that I had a knack for it. A professor encouraged me to apply for the internship, which hadn’t even previously been on my radar. I ended up working there through the rest of school even after my internship was complete.

Again somewhat accidentally, I became this go-to person for social media knowledge in my community. Small businesses would come to me for advice and individuals would as well.

I was working for a daily newspaper in that community when I decided to pitch my social media knowledge as a role to the leadership there. Over the course of a few years, I worked there as a digital media coordinator on the newspaper side to eventually helping the newspaper to launch a full-service digital agency division.

At that point, my now-husband and I weren’t sure that we wanted to live in that location long term. One of the ways it felt like I could forge a new path was by starting my own business. We moved to Central Pennsylvania and did just that.

What makes our social media marketing agency different from others is our ethos: Connect Through Community. As an agency, we know that social media has the power to make an economic impact on entire communities and regions, and our work with clients and through training supports that. The businesses and organizations we work with want to make their place a better place to live, work, or visit.

What’s really special about this work is that we can see its trickle effect. It’s so thrilling to be able to show up to a community event that’s sold out and know that we played a small part in making that happen; or walk down the street on a Thursday night in a previously sleepy small town knowing that we are part of the reason that locals and visitors are out and about exploring.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Something that clients have told us before is that “we feel like an extension of their team.” This is something that we really strive for.

At the end of the day, myself and the rest of the Hello Social Co. team are humans doing work for other humans. We don’t pretend to have all of the answers to every single question, we don’t position ourselves as “experts” in an industry where they really can’t exist, and we don’t rush or force projects/creativity.

It’s not uncommon for a client of ours to become more of a friend professionally. We try to be the kind of people that you’d want to invite to happy hour.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

At the end of 2023, things were not looking great for the business. I was pregnant with my second daughter, revenue was lower than it had been in years, and overall I just felt like myself and the business were in a funk. I had to make some really difficult choices, like laying off full-time team members in favor of part-time-only roles.

At that time, I also had a really unique and exciting opportunity presented to me to accept a full-time job that I hadn’t actually applied for. It was offered by a company that was familiar with my work and reputation, and they were willing to go to pretty great lengths to make it a reality. At a time of uncertainty, it was extremely appealing for myself and my family.

I got pretty far in the process before I realized that I actually wasn’t ready to give up on my business. I’ve spent 7 years building something, and while 2023 was not a walk in the park, I had to believe that business goes through ebbs and flows and that our rut was not going to last forever.

We’re not back to our pre-2023 revenue yet, but we’ve made significant strides in getting there. Most importantly, we’ve taken on projects this year so far that we’re really proud of — and have found a new symbiosis in our team that’s really working.

Contact Info:

• Website: hellosocialco.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/hellosocialco
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ellenmatis

Image Credits
Bona fide Photography of Central PA