Social media has become a big deal in business, whether we like it or not, and for Women to Work we’ve been on a journey of discovery over the last few months as we’ve explored how our use of social media impacts our business and how we can use it strategically.
Our story beings around 6 months ago, we’d been using Facebook and Twitter for some time to help us get the message out to our potential and current clients about our workshops and coaching sessions. As is often the case with small businesses, our use of social media was starting to take up more and more of our time, we used it sometimes inconsistently depending on our workload and had very little engagement or real plan around how and why we were using it and we were getting concerned it might become a distraction from what we do best – delivering workshops, coaching clients and designing schemes.
We’d had some dialog previously with Digital Mums, as our businesses were set up around the same time and we share a passion to support women and mums who want to work. So we decided to get their help!
Digital Mums introduced us to Ciara McCullagh – she would be working with us for the next 6 months on two of our platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Ciara was a Digital Mums student and we were her real life case study to support her learning on the programme.
Ciara took the time to really understand our brand and our business, she was thorough, asking us a lot of questions that really got us to think. This wasn’t just a case of sharing some content and hoping for the best, or telling our followers our latest news and expecting them to care! Ciara spent a huge amount of time finding out all about our business, our target audiences, why they would buy from us, what might stop them from interacting with us and really importantly what sort of content would our followers find inspiring and engaging.
Trust was a big issue for us, Women to Work belongs to Jenny and I, we’ve set it up, we run it, we are Women to Work, so letting someone else talk for us was scary, but Ciara proved to be professional and clear and really understood our tone of voice and what we are all about.
Ciara devised a detailed social media strategy and then designed and ran a creative and impactful campaign that exponentially increased our followings, our brand awareness and our engagement. Thanks to her work on our social media platforms we’re now on the radar of so many more potential customers, and are building good relationships with many of them on social media too.
Ciara was great to work with, inventive, adaptive and imaginative and we really trusted our brand in her hands. We’re continuing to work with her and in particular on LinkedIn. Jenny and I will take back Facebook and Twitter for now and will aim to keep up with Ciara’s great work (apologies in advance!).
So if you haven’t already – follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, connect with us on LinkedIn, with our company page or personal profiles and we hope to engage with you soon.
If you’d like help with your social media get in touch with Ciara via LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ciaramccullagh1 or email: ciararama@gmail.com or if you are interested in a career as a social media manager contact http://digitalmums.com
Emma
Emma Shute & Jenny Pollock are the Founders and Coaches at Women to Work.
Women to Work focuses on women’s development, both ‘into’ the workplace and ‘within’ the workplace. As well as one to one sessions and group coaching workshops for individual women, Women to Work offers women’s development programmes and coaching and mentoring programmes for organisations and ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) Level 3 & 5 Coaching & Mentoring training for individuals wanting a qualification in coaching.