The Future Work Design project has always been a collaboration. Back in Phase 1, there was East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Hull City Council, North Lincolnshire Council and North East Lincolnshire Council working alongside the University of Hull and funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. In Phase 2, Microsoft was added to the dream team.
But all along, there’s been a couple of other people working behind the scene to bring this project to life.
One of them is Matt Johnson (Different Resonance), who was brought on board to support Matt Wildbore (Mattix Design). While Mattix Design looked after the Future Work Design’s brand, design and website, Matt Johnson’s job was to drive traffic to the site via social media.
(With two Matt’s involved, this could get confusing. So, for clarity, from here on we’ll be talking about Matt Johnson 😉)
So, how did Matt get on?
The role of social media in the FWD project
There were two key objectives for the social media element of this project:
- Drive traffic to the blog and ultimately to the tools being developed
- Reach new people
The social media approach
When Matt joined the project, there were two existing social media profiles the team wanted to utilise, Twitter and LinkedIn. So, an initial plan was drawn up, which would see 3 posts per week being shared to both profiles. Over time, it has become clear that LinkedIn is the stronger channel. Therefore, when Matt is developing content, he will start with LinkedIn and what works for that platform.
The core of our social media content has been generated off the back of the blogs (more on this below) with the rest made up of engaging posts aimed at reaching new audiences (for example polls about working patterns).
When it comes to repurposing blog posts, there are a few ways this has been done. To launch the blog, it’s generally a post briefly highlighting the key focus of the blog accompanied by a simple call to action and the link. After that, Matt will look at any quotes that can be pulled out, discussion points or even summarising the key points in unique ways.
But, Matt doesn’t just rely on the blog and other social media posts to build our audience on LinkedIn. No, there’s a sneaky trick business page admins can use which allows them to invite their connections to follow the page.
As we had representatives from the four councils and the university, we spent a couple of months giving people the chance to send invites to their connections, most of which are the ideal audience for the work we’re doing.
The results
As mentioned above, LinkedIn has been the stronger profile and the focus of much of the work on social media. Here are some of the key stats we’ve pulled out from the LinkedIn reports.
56 average clicks through to the website each month (about 25% of our audience)
Average engagement rate of 7% (over 3x what is widely regarded as a ‘good’ rate on LinkedIn)
Follower count has almost doubled (and they’re made up of our target audience)
The final word
Matt, director of Different Resonance, says “People use social media to help tell their story. As an organisation (or project team in this case), your job is to help them tell that story. Provide them with content they want to interact with and share with their connections. If you’re too busy thinking about your objectives, the content won’t resonate with your audience.”
