In the honor of the International Women’s Day on Sunday March 8th, we at Foundry celebrated women, by organizing events every day of the work week from 2 - 6 March. Due to the importance of the topics we got presented (which were not only relevant for women!), we are going to share our throwbacks of this wonderful week.
We were very excited to start Women's Week with the event ‘Entrepreneur, Be a Voice Not an Echo’. We had three captivating speakers lined up for this lunch time event. Renata Plewniak, Ruchi Jaju and Jannika Salminen.
Through this event we wanted to raise awareness and give female entrepreneurs the courage to stand out in the crowd and not just follow the herd. And that’s exactly what our first speaker talked about.
Renata Plewniak is the Director of the Luxembourg-Poland Chamber of Commerce (LPCC). Her expertise on International Markets has been instrumental in energizing business relations. Renata brought up the challenges and fears women face for starting up their own business. Typical fears were; the fear of failure, dealing with limited access to funding, the legal/tax aspects and how to protect their business idea. With LPCC’s Entrepreneurial Women Project, Renata and her colleagues help women reach their dreams; whether the entrepreneurs need help to limit their many ideas, struggle to get enough ideas, or are searching for a supportive network and clients. Renata wants them all to believe in themselves and be who they are. A voice, not an echo.
Living in the 21st century, having an active online presence is the perfect way to stand out in the crowd. But how do you do that? Our second speaker, Ruchi Jaju, or Resilient Ruchi, as she likes to call herself, is a LinkedIn enthusiast and business professional. She is using LinkedIn as her working tool to reach out for people, brand herself and promote her professional life, and even to get leads.
During her engaging talk, Ruchi taught us about personal branding and shared, through her own story, how to succeed on LinkedIn. She described personal branding as “consciously positioning yourself to achieve desired professional goals”. Ruchi evolved in her personal branding by being open for new opportunities, creating opportunities herself and by never giving up. In a year's time, not only did she grow in the number of engagements for her posts, she also grew her network and community. Ruchi did this by staying her true self, by sharing her wisdom and opinions, and with consistency. Today Ruchi has an average of 10.000 views per post and big engagement from her audience. Ruchi went on LinkedIn to find a job, now her purpose has changed. Through LinkedIn, Ruchi got new project opportunities, in collaborations or being freelance, and especially recognition.
To get more into the technical prospect of LinkedIn, we had our last speaker of the day, Jannika Salminen. Jannika is a digital-focused Communications Specialist of MasonBower Luxembourg. Throughout her career and studies, she focused especially on digital branding, content marketing and social media, and how to turn algorithms to work on your behalf.
We all heard about algorithms, and it’s crucial that you keep them in mind when writing a post on LinkedIn, according to Jannika. In social media, algorithms are designed to deliver content to the user. On LinkedIn especially, algorithms’ goals are to prioritize relevant content and to promote engagement. Jannika advises that if you want to show up on people’s feed; make sure you write your own posts (don’t just share other people’s content), don’t put links in your texts (leave your link in the comments), tag relevant people, use relevant hashtags, post frequently and on a relevant time for your target audience. Jannika emphasizes, on LinkedIn it’s not only crucial to stand out from the crowd when you are an entrepreneur, it’s crucial for everyone.
